16-week semester plan
Use this page when you are running a course as a school semester — one class a week for sixteen weeks. It replaces the camp track day pages, not the per-course supplements.
The format
- 16 weeks x 1 session/week, 60-90 minutes per session = 16-24 hours of class time.
- Audience: a school class, ages 7-13, mixed ability.
- Same material as camp. Every course in the hub is Intro + Setup + Stages 1-10. Nothing is cut. The extra hours go into recall, stretch work, and a real showcase.
- One project all term. Students build a single growing project, exactly as in camp — the only difference is that the gap between sessions is seven days instead of overnight.
The seven-day gap is the whole design problem. Everything on this page exists to solve it.
Week map
This map works for every course in the hub, because every course has the same shape.
| Week | Session | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Orientation + Setup | Accounts work, tools open, Setup page is complete and saved with a name the student will recognize. |
| 2 | Stage 1 | First visible piece of the project. Establish the weekly rhythm. |
| 3 | Stage 2 | Students repeat the workflow without being walked through it. |
| 4 | Stage 3 | |
| 5 | Stage 4 | |
| 6 | Stage 5 + mid-term playtest | Halfway. Everyone plays someone else's project. |
| 7 | Stage 6 | |
| 8 | Stage 7 | |
| 9 | Catch-up / repair week | No new stage. Absences get recovered, broken projects get fixed. |
| 10 | Stage 8 | |
| 11 | Stage 9 | |
| 12 | Stage 10 | The core project is complete and playable end to end. |
| 13 | Stretch Challenge lab | Students pick Medium and Hard Stretch Challenges from any stage. |
| 14 | Personalize + peer playtest | Theme, colors, names, difficulty tuning. Then a full-room playtest. |
| 15 | Polish + showcase rehearsal | Bug fixes, then every student practices explaining their project. |
| 16 | Showcase | Families or another class come in. Certificates. |
Why catch-up sits at Week 9, not Week 15. Over sixteen weeks, students will miss classes. Each stage builds on the one before, so a student who misses Week 5 is blocked in Week 6 and every week after. A repair week in the middle stops absences from compounding. If you save catch-up for the end, half the room is already stuck by Week 10.
What a session looks like
Two shapes, depending on your period length. Both open with recall and close with a save.
60-minute period
| Time | Block | Minutes |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 | Reopen project + warm-up recall | 10 |
| 0:10 | The big idea + coach demo | 10 |
| 0:20 | Build it | 25 |
| 0:45 | Test your stage | 10 |
| 0:55 | Save + exit ticket | 5 |
90-minute period
| Time | Block | Minutes |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 | Reopen project + warm-up recall | 10 |
| 0:10 | The big idea + coach demo | 10 |
| 0:20 | Build it | 35 |
| 0:55 | Break / movement | 5 |
| 1:00 | Try this + Test your stage | 20 |
| 1:20 | Stretch or personalize | 5 |
| 1:25 | Save + exit ticket | 5 |
If a stage runs long, cut the Stretch block first and the Try this block second. Never cut Test your stage — a student who leaves with an untested project starts next week debugging instead of building.
The weekly rituals
These five habits are what make a weekly course work. Run them every session, in this order.
1. The reopen ritual
Budget the first 5-10 minutes for students to find and reopen their own project. This is not wasted time — after seven days, most students genuinely cannot remember what their file was called or which tab it lived in.
The Setup page of every course ends with "save it with a name you'll recognize." In camp that line is a nicety. In a semester it is load-bearing. In Week 1, make sure every student's project is named with their own name in it, and write down where it lives:
- Browser tools (Scratch, Trinket, Colab) — the account it is saved under.
- Local tools (Roblox Studio, Unity, VS Code) — the machine and the folder, because a student on a different machine in Week 6 will not find last week's file.
2. Warm-up recall
Before any new code, students run last week's project and say what it does. Two minutes, out loud, to a partner. This does more for retention than any review slide, and it surfaces broken projects at minute two instead of minute forty.
Ask: "What did you add last week, and what does it do?"
3. The build block
Run the stage exactly as written. The course pages are the lesson plan — you do not need a separate one.
4. Save before the bell
Non-negotiable, and worth a visible timer. A student who does not save loses a week, not a night. Watch for the two classic losses: unsaved local files, and edits made while the project was in Play or Run mode.
5. Exit ticket
One sentence, on paper or in a shared doc:
"This week my project got ______, and it works because ______."
It takes ninety seconds, gives you a per-student progress record, and feeds directly into grading.
Absence and make-up
Assume every student misses two sessions.
- The course pages are public. Everything is at creatorshub.app, so a missed stage can be completed at home or in a study period. Send the direct stage link.
- A missed stage must be finished before the next one starts. Stages build. Do not let a student start Stage 6 on top of a missing Stage 5.
- Week 9 is the safety net. Any student who is one or two stages behind catches up here. A student who is more than three stages behind should drop to the minimum viable finish described on that course's supplement page instead of trying to catch up on everything.
- Pair a returning student with a finisher for the first ten minutes. The finisher re-explains the stage, which is good for both of them.
Assessment
You do not need a new rubric — the course pages already contain one. Each stage gives you three gradeable artifacts:
| Artifact | Where it lives | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Test your stage checklist | End of every stage | Completion. Did the feature get built and does it run? |
| The Design check bullet | Last item in that same checklist | Judgment. Is the change fair, fun, readable? |
| Exit ticket | Your own weekly ritual | Understanding, in the student's own words. |
A simple term-long scheme that fits the material:
- Weekly (10 stage weeks): stage complete + exit ticket submitted.
- Mid-term (Week 6): the project runs end to end through Stage 5, and the student can explain one design choice.
- Final (Weeks 15-16): the project runs end to end, the student presents it, and the certificate page at the end of the course is issued.
Grade the explanation, not the typing. A student who built less but can explain what they built has learned more than one who pasted ten stages without testing.
Substitutes
A weekly course will hit a session you are not there for. Leave the substitute two things:
- The course page URL and the current week number from the map above.
- The Buffer activities page.
If the substitute cannot run a build block, the honest fallback is a playtest and feedback session on the projects the class already has. It is a real activity, needs no setup, and loses nothing that Week 9 cannot recover.
Course-specific notes
This page is the arc. The per-course supplement pages carry the details that differ by course — minimum viable finish, coach triage, and common stuck points all apply to a semester exactly as written. Only their "At a glance" day tables are camp-only; map those days onto the week map above.
Find your course in the list on the Code Coach Pack page.
Before Week 1
- Confirm every machine can open the course tool and creatorshub.app.
- Set up accounts that will still exist in Week 16 — school accounts, not throwaways.
- Decide where projects are saved, and write it somewhere students can read it all term.
- Walk through Setup and Stage 1 yourself.
- Tell families the showcase date in Week 1, not Week 15.
- Print the week map or keep it open on a second screen.