New article: Classroom debugging tips

I'm starting weekly programming office hours for the Khan Lab School, and today was my first time down there, helping the mixed age students with their challenges and projects. As I helped them debug their programs, I realized that other teachers and TAs could benefit from my strategies for debugging programs together. That's why I ran home and wrote this classroom debugging guide. Enjoy, and let me know if you have any tips to add!

Check out awesome projects from Algorithms students!

In November, we released the algorithms course, a combination of articles, visualizations, quizzes, coding challenges, a few creative projects. Today we turned on the project evaluations page for algorithms, so that our community can see the neat projects that learners are coming up with, and help evaluate the projects. Here are some of my favorites I've seen so far:

A visualization of selection sort:

A rainbow-colored Sierpinski triangle:

Check out more on the project feedback page and give them your feedback!

How does our real-time editor work? Find out for yourself!

We now have a real-time, interactive editing environment on Khan Academy for JS/ProcessingJS, HTML, and SQL. Last year, we decided to make the editing environment open source on Github, to share how it works and encourage others to contribute. We've since had multiple contributors, and the most prolific, Kevin Barbarash, joined KA as a full-time employee.

If you're curious how it works, you can watch this talk from John Resig and this talk from me (Pamela Fox). You can also read this deep dive into the JS editor or browse through the code itself. If you're willing and able, we'd love more help in tackling the many complex issues that we run into when creating this cross-browser, real-time environment that's used by millions of students.

New classroom project idea: Make a music video

In our teacher's guide, we have a list of additional project ideas. I've just added another project to that, Project: Make a music video. That project is based on the Let it Code music video that I made with our online community last year, and it would be a lot of fun for a classroom of creative coders.

If you try that project or have other additional project ideas, let us know!