2022 Brings New Features and New Support Tools

Over the last few months we’ve been hard at work making enhancements to our learning tools and offerings. With the feedback from our passionate community of 140,000 educators, we focused our efforts on the elements that will improve student engagement and support educators.

Ozaria Continues to Evolve

We launched Ozaria with the knowledge and learnings from CodeCombat. Now with some time out in the field with real students and teachers, we’ve gained further insight needed to spark our next set of improvements.

All New Comprehensive Getting Started Guide: Adding to our robust library of teacher resources is this detailed step-by-step guide to get your class coding. The included search feature allows you to find what you are looking for quickly and the included FAQs are there to answer anything else. Preview the Getting Started Guide now.

Updated Lesson Plans and Pacing Guide: These resources have been carefully honed by our team to provide you with the tools necessary to successfully guide your students through each module’s learning objectives. Check out Chapter 1 Lesson Slides and the Pacing Guide.

Shared Class Access: Now teachers can share access to classrooms, allowing for greater transparency and collaboration between teams of educators. With variable access levels available, you can share strictly for visibility or provide full edit access.

Outcomes Report: Easily see your students’ course progress, achievements, and concepts covered at the class, school or district level.

Clever SSO: It’s even easier now for students to access the curriculum with our integration with Clever, including listings in the Clever App Library for CodeCombat and Ozaria.

Improved Performance and Loading Speeds: Web based access has many advantages and to ensure the best performance we’ve significantly reduced asset file sizes to dramatically improve loading times and gain a much smoother experience for even low bandwidth internet connections.

Voiceover Content: Not all students are visual learners. That is why we’ve added voiceover instruction to help those that can benefit from the audio cues. Chapter 1 is complete and available now, with voiceover for the remaining chapters to be released soon.

New DEI Initiatives: Diversity isn’t just acknowledging the presence of differences within our learning community, but also the practice of celebrating those differences. With four new hero body types to choose from and the ability to further customize with a broad range of skin tones, hairstyles and features, anyone can see themselves as the hero. Learn more about how we are implementing DEI here.

Commitment to Social and Emotional Learning: We’ve incorporated evidence-based SEL activities into our curriculum to address and inspire development of the 5 core SEL competencies. See more on our philosophy here.

Certificates of Achievement: Recognition of student progress is an important piece to driving engagement. Download and personalize for the students in your class today.

Professional Development, Anytime, Anywhere

Most educators that are new to teaching CS or looking to build their skills need resources that are tailored to their needs. That’s why we’re excited to announce the launch of our teacher-driven professional development course.

This 40 hour self-paced program empowers all teachers with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to effectively teach computer science. The course includes 46 lessons ranging from Computational Thinking to Compound Conditionals and so much more!

While our PD pairs exceptionally well with the Ozaria curriculum, the learnings can be applied to use of CodeCombat or any implementation of CS education. Try the Sample Lesson.

New CodeCombat Features

All New Comprehensive Getting Started Guide: This  detailed walkthrough outlines all the steps to get your class coding. The content is fully searchable so you can find exactly what you need. And the extensive FAQs will help to provide answers to most other outstanding questions. Preview the Getting Started Guide now.

Outcomes Report: Linked directly from the teacher dashboard, get an instant snapshot of your students’ progress.

Student Facing Lesson Slides: Seeing the success educators had with student facing lesson slides in Ozaria, we’ve authored and added a specific set to our CodeCombat teacher dashboard as well. Check out CS1 Lesson Slides.

Esports Link From Student and Teacher Dashboards: Everyone can easily access the CodeCombat AI League at any time directly from their dashboard.

More Coding Languages Available: We have unlocked C++ for all and currently have Java in an experimental alpha. If interested in trying that out contact us at support@codecombat.com.

Educational Esports

We launched the CodeCombat AI League last year and the growth has been tremendous. Season 3 wrapped in December with our Giant’s Gate regular season arena drawing over 40K players and over 6K taking on the challenge of the Colossus Clash Finals. Over the first 3 seasons we’ve seen over 1.8M players earn CodePoints by writing code in CodeCombat.

If you are looking for ways to engage students and give them a creative and competitive outlet to showcase their coding skills, then it’s time to join the CodeCombat AI League. Check out all the highlights of this incredible tournament in our Season Recap Video.

Need Funding?

Our CS solutions align with the high-priority initiatives supported by the COVID 19 CARES Act – ESSER & GEER relief funding programs. Learn how you can get funding support here.

More to Come

While these are a long list of changes and updates, we’re not done yet. We still have more features on the way! And as always, welcome questions and feedback. If you’re a teacher email us at schools@ozaria.com or request a demo anytime.