Website update 16/9/21

A new website update for you all today, that has actually been going on over the past few days.

We’ve had a bit of a break from this site while we looked at some of our other sites, but are now back on it and you should have (hopefully) noticed some changes.

First change is the front page, which we haven’t changed in a while! Hopefully this now better reflects the different facets of the website and brings it a little bit more up to date in terms of style.

Second, a bit more of a rewrite for our keyword match up games. While there was certainly nothing wrong with the keyword match up games, the styling needed looking at and we have also been looking at them from a more long term perspective as well. The originals were hand coded for the most part in JS and stuck into WordPress.

Unfortunately this didn’t give us any way to integrate them into the WordPress eco system but thankfully we’ve recently come across something that allows us to do this and hopefully in the future, for logged in users, you will be able to score points (and maybe get rewards) for doing the puzzles.

The end goal is to gamify the site a bit more to hopefully make the learning a bit more fun and we’ll be working on this over the next few months in the run up to January.

You may have noticed we’ve added a login button at the top right of the screen to try and encourage more people to create an account so that they can earn the points when we get these up and running. Interestingly the keyword match up game actually saves your progress if you are logged in so if you are a big user of these, I’d recommend making yourself a free account and maybe signing up for our newsletter while you are at it!

The final thing to say for the keyword match up games are that the KS3 modules have now been started and the aim is to finish some more of these over the end part of this week. As stated a few posts back, the KS3 keyword match ups follow the free resources from Teach Computing.

The final updates are just a few stylistic ones – we’ve put the Python Online code and the Python Blocks pages actually within the WordPress template so that the rest of the site is accessible while you work on programming. This makes sense instead of flying people out to random pages. It has however brought to our attention the need to style these pages to better fit in with the look of the site so expect a bit of styling to go on over the coming weeks and months!

As ever, we’ve got plenty planned and nothing is safe from a full re-write! I’d better get off … I have a newsletter to write now. Many thanks for your support!