Website update 24/7/22

Welcome to another website update. To manage workload and to really pin down what needs to be done across the websites we operate, I purchased a new organisational platform. From this, I went through the site and noted down anything that needed looking at or anything that needed doing and wrote these into a number of different projects and tasks. While this was hard, it was also cathartic to actually write everything down that needed doing, all the bits I already probably knew but forget about when you aren’t looking at the website!

So this weeks updates involved going through a number of the tasks that had been written down. The first task involved changing the CSS for the Towers of Hanoi puzzle, something that had been annoying me for a while. In the previous version when you first picked up one of the discs the disc would go behind the rest of the puzzle instead of remaining on the top where you could see it. At the time the error occurred I wasn’t sure what the error was but on this run through I instantly knew what the issue was and was correct when I trialled it. So the Towers of Hanoi puzzle discs no longer hide themselves when you try and move them to the next post.

I next moved onto making changes to the Parsons Puzzles section of the site. This was what the main time was spent on this week as there was a lot of things that needed sorting in this section. While it still isn’t complete, everything is now a lot more uniform and more complete than it was.

First part was to change the styling of some of the buttons. Some were blue, some were black and some didn’t work at all. The next part was to put some more information into the page that explained the differences between the normal parson puzzles and the challenge versions to make it clear to people what the differences were (same puzzle but challenge you have to indent the code yourself).

The biggest part of this section was actually creating some more of the KS3 Python challenge tasks as only one had been completed previously. This involved a lot of work styling them and getting them to work as the program being used was rather finicky to say the least. The end result is that now all of the KS3 Parson puzzle tasks now have an associated challenge task to go along with them.

While testing the KS4 Python tasks it was realised that there was an error for users not logged in and that the KS4 ones were not accessible. This was due to the KS4 tasks using the older piece of code that had been updated for all of the KS3 puzzles. The decision was therefor made to update the KS4 puzzles to the new version and have it similar to the KS3 versions where there would be a normal version and a challenge version where they have to manually perform the indentation.

The KS4 parson puzzles were changed over to the new version and the plan is to add the challenge versions of these at a later date. So as you can see, there has been a lot of work done this week and there are lots of things still to do. Within the parsons puzzles section there is also scope to add some more puzzles so that they can cater to a wider audience and students can also get more puzzles to solve if they need the practice or if some are more suitable to the scheme of work that they are following. I’d also like to translate the KS4 ones to VB.Net and whichever the other programming language is that is accepted by AQA/OCR (I think it’s Java?!).

So that it is it for this weeks update – we’re ploughing on through the different projects and getting all existing things up to scratch and complete as much as possible. If you can support the free work that we are doing, please use our Ko-fi link to buy us a coffee / put towards our server costs which have risen by 350%! Once again many thanks for your support.