Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy

Use educational affordances of robotics to create CS-STEM opportunities for all learners

July 14, 2021

2021 State of Development: CS2N

By Tom Luong

State of Development: CS2N

My name is Thomas Luong, and welcome to a new series of behind-the-scenes of ever-evolving curricula platform that is CS2N. I am one of the main developers that contributed to what CS2N is today. How you navigate, use, and even encounter errors (we swear we have a list!) is because of our small development team!

The nature of development with CS2N is often silent, due to having a smaller team. Sometimes things can go unannounced since we can get wrapped up in development. Did an error that you previously encountered just suddenly go away? Wasn’t there a button there? Did some color or rounded corners change? What’s even happening?!

This also applies to features that we are excited about as well! We work on features, do testing, then deploy! Sometimes features are big and we hear about how it impacts our users, and sometimes they go unnoticed. It’s also very important to mention that most of our features are requests from our users, so in a way, you help shape CS2N into what it is today!

Manage Certificates

A feature that came from a handful of CS2N users is having the ability to print out certificates from the Groups view. Each activity and curriculum that a user completes come with a Certificate of Completion! However, they are originally accessible from that user’s account. Now, with the Manage Certificates feature, group administrators can quickly view who completed which activity, and can print those certificates all from one page!

overview.png

In the Groups view, clicking on the new Manage Certificates button will take you to a table view of all the activities added and the students that have completed them.

progress_table.png

Students that completed the activity are shown with the date they completed the activity as well as the link to their certificate of completion. Clicking on that will generate the certificate, for which you can download and print right on the spot!

certificate.png

For instructors that teach in person, this can be very useful for those who want to print and award the certificates to their students themselves (e.g. a ceremony)!

That’s all from the CS2N front!