October 2026 Update

Charlie Meyer

Charlie Meyer

— 2 min read
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Happy October! It’s been a busy start to the school year and we’re looking forward to a productive fall filled with meeting more teachers at conferences, improving the platform, and continuing to support computer science education.

Despite all of the pessimistic AI headlines out there, we still believe in the importance of teaching CS. The fundamental critical thinking skills and foundational knowledge of technology that students learn through CS are timeless and transferrable to any career.

LaTeX support in Markdown

LaTeX is a standard format used for displaying formulas and you can now use LaTeX code in your instructions in Pickcode. This should be helpful for lessons that involve math, physics, or data science.

Setting student names

You can now override a student’s display name and enter a first and last name by clicking “Change name” on a student’s card on the class “Members” tab. We’ll be adding better first/last name sorting options for lists of students soon which will make it easier to match up your views in Pickcode to your LMS.

Up next: Class page overhaul

In an upcoming update this month, we’ll be overhauling the look and feel of the class management pages. We’ll be updating the navigation and layout to streamline accessing common views and settings. These changes will not have any student-facing effects.

We’ve also begun designing the system for configuring more specific assignment access rules. As a part of this project, we’ll be adding options for:

  • Scheduling assignment publish dates
  • Customizing what happens when students mark an assignment as done
  • Assigning work for a specific set of students in a class
  • Extending due dates or restricting access for specific students

You can read about our full product roadmap for the school year here.

Other improvements and fixes

Here are a few smaller changes we made in the past month:

  • Improve the look and feel of the assignment creation menu
  • Show each assignment’s status (Draft, Locked, etc.) and due date in a class’s assignment list
  • Display a message on the student work dashboard if a student shared a project with another student
  • Fix sorting of groups on the assignment page and in the student work view.
  • Add a tooltip for group member names on the student work page
  • Fix issue with switching project types within a lesson

Providing feedback

Thanks for reading! If you have any product feedback or suggestions, feel free to reply to this email or send me a message at charlie@pickcode.io. For more time sensitive questions or issues, send a message to support@pickcode.io.

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