Do you want to run a workshop?

Following on from the post I made a while back about writing resources, I thought a post about things to consider when running a workshop for beginner coders might be handy too. This post is primarily aimed at those lovely people who have no training in education but who give up their time to teach

One pseudocode to rule them all?

Well met, generous reader. It’s been a while. As you can probably tell from the total lack of posts, I don’t have much free time. I now work four days a week, and then I work even harder the other three days, looking after my son. My free time is largely spent sleeping to survive,

Bonjour, tout le monde!

Did I ever tell you about the time I taught Year 7 French? The Head called me into his office one summer and basically said that they didn’t have enough to fill my timetable and could I please teach a class of Year 7 French as there was no one else to do it. He

Writing programming workshop resources

I write a lot of educational resources, so I thought it might be useful to share some tips for things I’ve learnt over the years. I’m hoping that these tips will be particularly helpful for those people in the wider community who volunteer to give up a lot of their time to run workshops for

gui zero – making Python GUIs really simple

The code in this post has been updated to reflect the changes in guizero version 0.4. When I was a teacher, I found it frustrating that it was not at all easy for students to create GUIs using Python. I used tkinter a little bit with my GCSE class and they instantly loved creating GUIs,

Exciting adventures at Pycon UK

Having missed out on the previous n years and had to endure extreme jealousy caused by the exciting tweets, I decided that this was going to be the year I finally went to Pycon. I had heard that there was an education track and that this was the way to meet real live developers! I

Cat Cat Code Ltd

So here it is! I’m taking the plunge as of September and starting my own business – Cat Cat Code Ltd. I’ve put up a blog post with some tips on teaching HTML and CSS on the site so please do pop over and have a look. If you know of someone who could benefit

Exciting news!

I’m excited to announce that as of September I will be starting an education consultancy business and will be available to hire for training, speaking, advice and other awesome Comp. Sci. related activities. When it comes to big changes, I don’t do them by halves. Since June this year I have got married, moved house,

Scratch is the new Powerpoint

I keep hearing the phrase “Scratch is becoming the new Powerpoint” – teachers all over the country (nay, the world) are using the same programming teaching tool to teach with. So why is it that in a world with so many free tools for teaching kids to code, everyone seems to be using the same one? I have a reason.

Computing – the cake is a lie

I’m nearly at the end of my first time round teaching GCSE Computing and something has been bothering me. I decided to leave the topic of networking until the end, because I think it’s one of the hardest and also because I thought it would be beneficial to do it in Year 11 when my