The 2021 end of year website update

2021 has been another eventful and stressful year for teachers. It didn’t start well with lock down and then we had the absolute nightmare that was CAGS / TAGS for the 2nd year in a row. As a profession, we’ve adapted again and again to the changing circumstances and helped students through one of the most challenging times. For this, the profession can hold its head high and be proud of what it has achieved.

As I begin writing this (it’s mid December) it looks like 2022 may well turn out to be another challenging year which I personally fear, will involve more disruption to students education.

When I started the site back in 2018, I wanted to help teachers and students of Computer Science by providing free resources and in this time lots of websites have started to pop up by teachers and institutions, including the excellent free resources from the National Centre for Computing Education and Oak Academy. It’s great that so many free resources now exist for Computer Science and I’m happy that I’ve managed to keep the site aligned with this goal and add to the resources available. I feel that it is now, more important than ever, to provide resources that free teachers from the burden of planning and having to think of lesson ideas so they can have a life outside of school.

Since July, and a change in circumstance, I’ve been able to pile a lot more time into the site and it’s grown and matured a lot. It’s been styled, and lots of pages, posts, updates and features have been added. It’s been quite the journey!

A bit of what’s been done this year (WWW) is listed below:

• Regular social media posting
• Resources for seasonal events
• Stylistic improvements
• Interactive logic gate puzzles added
• Randomised Do Now/Starter questions to PowerPoint
• Keyword scramble improvements
• Menu improvements
• Site speed improvements (caching, image types used etc)
• New blog posts
• Word searches added
• Parsons puzzles rewrite and in VB.NET
• Python errors and explanation videos
• Caesar cipher updates and Vigenere cipher tasks added

I’ve been aware for some time however, that there are lots of things on the site that are individual tools that on their own, serve little purpose. While they may spark some inspiration from teachers and can potentially be used as a tool during a lesson, I want the experience to be a little more seamless, something that a teacher can pick up and the whole lesson is done for them, with appropriate real time feedback for students as they are going through and different levels of challenge based on the student.

To say what is planned is ambitious, would be an understatement but it’s on the to do list, and I’m aiming to make it happen in 2022.

Better experiences, more resources and overall a website that continues to offer free computer science resources to students and teachers.

Over the break, we’ve been working on things behind the scenes, which we’ll reveal in the New Year as part of this plan – I can’t wait to show you them!

I’d like to thank you for reading this, and for supporting the site so far. I hope that 2022 will be a fantastic year for one and all.