How-To Guides
Additional Information for Homeschoolers

As a home user, you may be initially intimidated by the arsenal of tools and features at your disposal. Don’t be! You have access to the same exceptional, rigorous reporting system and individualized instruction typically afforded only to the schools and tutoring centers.

Accordingly, you will notice that the Main Menu frequently employs school terms like “teacher”, “class”, and “administrator.” This guide is meant to be a distilled translation of the Main Admin Menu for home use. Please consult the full User Guide for more in-depth explanation of Explode The Code Online’s capabilities.

Let’s start by dissecting the Main Menu
Immediately, you’ll notice the four color-coded quadrants: Student and Class Roster Management, Student & Class Reports, Virtual Classroom Management, and Curriculum Settings.

You can click on any of the quadrant icons to either expand or collapse a given portion of the menu.

Student and Class Roster Management
This is where you handle the basic administrative tasks of your “student” and “teacher” (i.e. parent) accounts.

You will mostly use the My Class Rosters and Teacher and Admin Management sections of this menu. My Class Rosters is where you create and manage your student accounts and “classes”. You may be confused by the need to create a “class” as a homeschooler. Just consider it a conceptual obligation—you can’t create a new student if there isn’t a class in which to place them. Once you have created your class, it will appear in the roster and students can be added to it at any time. See the Setting up a Class for a screen-by-screen walk-through of the process.

Teacher and Admin Management is where “Administrator” and “Teacher” accounts (i.e. the parent accounts) are maintained. Here you can change passwords/usernames, update email addresses, and even create additional admin/teacher accounts (e.g. for your spouse, or your child’s tutor). As a home user, you won’t likely have the need to create a “teacher” account. These accounts are more useful in a school setting where the administrator doesn’t want to grant all-access privileges to the teachers. Teacher accounts have slightly less administrative authority.

Student and Class Reports
Here, you should focus your attention on the drop-down menu prompting you to “select a student.” Once you select your child’s name from the list, you will be brought to his or her performance summary page. Here you can analyze the progress your child has made.
See the full User Guide for detailed analysis of the numerous reports at your disposal.

My Class Reports generates three different reports on the classroom level: “Current Activity”, “Performance Level”, and “Usage over Time.” Again, these are most beneficial to teachers who need to analyze general classroom trends, not just those of individual students. However, you may still find this data interesting.

Virtual Classroom Management
The Virtual Classroom Managment section is not relevant to home users; in short, this feature allows teachers to monitor the session of an entire classroom of children at once from their computer. At home, it’s rare to have more than one or two children usingthe program at a time so this corner of the menu does not apply.

Curriculum Settings
The Curriculum Settings section, however, is of great use to homeschoolers and schools alike. Here, you can manually override the system to adjust your student’s level to any point in the entire curriculum. This is also where you can customize the reward settings—i.e. you can choose to reward your child with access to kid-friendly games after a customizable period of time.

These features can also be accessed, however, directly from the student summary page by clicking on the “account settings” tab at the top of the page. Again, these processes are illustrated in great detail in the full User Guide.