I’ve been a bit obsessed recently with figuring out how to create those red/cyan shadows of picture (like the Tik Tok logo)
Category: News
Getting basic LED electronics to work with raspberry pi 400
Space Invaders with Pygame
This is what I gave my Year 12s as a starter to work on creating the movement for their Aliens
Pushing ahead with Python
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?
3D Game Programming for Kids – examples from book
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.
Bitesize Revision for GCSE Computer Science
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.
Visualise line by line code execution in Python
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:
This was recommended by Al Sweigart in his Automate The Boring Stuff with Python (https://automatetheboringstuff.com/)
Quick Tip – Splitting Names in Excel (Formula)
Splitting names in Excel:
=LEFT(B1,FIND(” “,B1,1)-1)
=RIGHT(B1,LEN(B1)-FIND(” “,B1,1))
FutureLearn – Object Oriented Programming in Python
I came across this course on the Raspberry Pi Certified Educators Course this October. It piqued my interest as it uses a text based adventure game to introduce OOP concepts to learners.
I had previously done this with an idea of a Space Invaders game using Visual Basic.NET. This was a fun introduction to concepts and it is easy to create classes and objects in VB. However my current cohort of learners are mostly unfamiliar with VB and have a better grasp of Python.
The course is written by Laura Sach, who I finally met at PiCademy after years of following her on Twitter. And I thouroughly recommend it as an accessible way of understanding Object Oriented Principles in Python
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/object-oriented-principles/