Pencil Code is a service intended for use by all ages, so our users' privacy and safety are very important to us. To protect the privacy of all our users, we limit what we collect and what we publish on the service. Although Pencil Code is a noncommercial service, our policies are in accordance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) that limits use of children's personally identifiable information by commercial services.
You can see, create, edit, and run programs with Pencil Code without registering. However, if you want to save your own projects on the Pencil Code service, you must register for an account.
When you register for an account, we ask that you do not use your real name as a username. We will delete accounts that have a username or identifier that contains your full first and last name.
Pencil Code does not collect personally identifiable information, and our Terms of Service expressly prohibit posting personally identifiable information. That means you are not allowed to post content containing your own full name or the full name of other users, contact information, addresses, or other identifying information. We will remove personally identifiable information that we find on the service.
Teachers and other adults who need to post contact information or other personally identifying information are encouraged to use other services to host that content.
One of the missions of Pencil Code is to nurture a community of students who learn from each other, so all content posted on Pencil Code is shared with all other users of Pencil Code. Other users may copy share information that you post.
You can change your password or delete your account at any time. To delete your account, simply delete all the files in your account. If you have forgotten your password or if you need to delete your (or your child's) account and you do not have the password, email david.bau@gmail.com, and David will reset the password or delete the account.
We put "cookies" on your computer to track when you are logged in to Pencil Code, and to help you return to find your previous work.
We save backups of your data on your local computer to help safeguard your data when the network is unreliable.
When you save, view, and run projects on Pencil Code, information is collected to facilitate analysis and improvement of the services. A record is saved of your interactions with Pencil Code and the state of your project when you run it.
Some of this data may be used in research studies intended to improve our understanding of how people learn with the system. The results of this research may be shared with educators and researchers through conferences, journals, and other publications.