Happy New Year 2022!
Teacher,
Cat enthusiast
- The 2022 End of Year Website Update - 01/01/2023
- Celebrating Ada Lovelace day - 10/10/2022
- Website update 5/9/22 - 05/09/2022
We’re wishing everyone a great year in 2022 – I think we deserve it! This post is a quick update on the following:
- Website updates that have gone live for 2022
- Planned website updates going forward
We’ve pushed out a good few website updates over the past few days to get the site ready for 2022 which are listed below:
We’ve made a few style improvements across the site including a slight tweak to the colour scheme, remaking the ‘Hello World!’ logo to fit better with the site and styling a few other parts.
Something old
We’ve finally got round to restyling Python Blocks which had remained a bit of an ugly duckling on the site for a bit too long! The colour scheme is now consistent with the rest of the website and it now looks like it belongs in the site as opposed to something tacked on.
Python Blocks is actually one of the oldest parts of the website and certainly needs some TLC in 2022. A few of the code blocks need to be implemented correctly so that they will run as expected and this is something that will be looked at this year.
Something new
One of the newest features of the site is within the menu heading ‘GCSE KS4 – Age14+’ which now contains links to AQA and OCR GCSE exam board specific tools like quizzes and keyword tests.
Previously, we’ve concentrated on OCR content as this was the specification that I was teaching but it has always been the intention to incorporate other computer science exam boards into the resources. 2022 is the start of this transition and while these sections are a little bare bones at the minute, the intention is to add to these over 2022 to create something that teachers can go to and use no matter which exam board they are using.
As OCR and AQA are the main Computer Science exam boards, these will be concentrated on first and once they are in a good state, other exam boards can be looked at.
Another big update is the introduction of ‘CS Points’ that ties into the quizzes that we have launched in the exam board sections. Anytime you complete a quiz and get full marks you will now get 10 CS Points. The idea of this is to make this a bit of a fun competition between students. While implemented in a basic fashion at the moment, this will be expanded to include ranks in the future depending on how many points are earned.
Something future?!
I’ve talked about Python Blocks getting some TLC and adding more quizzes and content into the GCSE exam board specific categories this year.
Further to this, the intention is still to get Computer Science ‘Courses’ implemented into the site. This is again something that needs some TLC this year to style it and produce the content.
We really hope that you enjoy the 2022 updates so far and that they are useful. We’re working hard to improve the site further this year and increase what is on offer.
Thanks for reading, and thank you for your support so far – role on 2022!