Category: News

It’s reports time again – specifically UCAS references time. And I need to write up to 140 words on each of my students.

I like using Excel for such things but was surprised there was no easy way of counting the words in each cell. I knew you could count characters using LEN() but not how to count the words…. till I found this post and this useful snippet:

=LEN(TRIM(text)) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(text, " ", "")) + 1

I’ve been a bit obsessed recently with figuring out how to create those red/cyan shadows of picture (like the Tik Tok logo)

I finally got around to plugging some basic electronics into the GPIO pins on the back of the Raspberry Pi 400 i got

This is what I gave my Year 12s as a starter to work on creating the movement for their Aliens

So this summer I’ve been coding in Python.

I’v decided to push this in my A Level classes more than learning VB.net, Javascript & PHP. Not because I don’t enjoy doing these languages, but that some students would struggle with switching between these. Perhaps code agnostism only comes with a maturity of having to learn different programming languages over the years?

I am currently teaching Javascript to Year 9s as we are in remote learning mode and it has worked well as it is a web based language which students can easily do in a browser without needing any special software. I have the first edition of the following book and it’s great.

I’ve created a podcast for GCSE Computer Science students to revise topics in small “bite size” chunks.

I’m slowly releasing new episodes, but I’ve committed to doing an episode a week, as I realised people were actually listening to them.

You can either listen using the embed above or go direct to the page here, https://anchor.fm/bitesize-computer-science where you can leave an audio message, which I might include in a future podcast.

I stumbled across this website that allows you to visualise line by line execution ina Python program. This may be useful for students who are unclear about how a function (or blocks of code) run within a program:

http://pythontutor.com/visualize.html#code=def%20hi%28name%29%3A%0A%20%20%20%20print%28%22hello%20%22%20%2B%20name%29%0A%20%20%20%20%0Ahi%28%22bob%22%29%0Ahi%28%22jeff%22%29&cumulative=false&curInstr=8&heapPrimitives=nevernest&mode=display&origin=opt-frontend.js&py=3&rawInputLstJSON=%5B%5D&textReferences=false

This was recommended by Al Sweigart in his Automate The Boring Stuff with Python (https://automatetheboringstuff.com/)

Splitting names in Excel:
=LEFT(B1,FIND(” “,B1,1)-1)
=RIGHT(B1,LEN(B1)-FIND(” “,B1,1))