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,Continue reading “One pseudocode to rule them all?”
Tag Archives: computing
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. HeContinue reading “Bonjour, tout le monde!”
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! IContinue reading “Exciting adventures at Pycon UK”
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.Continue reading “Scratch is the new Powerpoint”
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 myContinue reading “Computing – the cake is a lie”
Computing – A beautiful dream
I didn’t believe the hype on the news about bad teachers. I mean, nobody I worked with was rubbish at their job so I put it down to teacher bashing media nonsense and got on with my life. I was happy to share my resources here and on CAS and to help people who asked for my help,Continue reading “Computing – A beautiful dream”
Javascript Binary to Denary
I wrote this but I am not sure I can use it for the purpose I wanted. Feel free to use if it’s useful to you! <html> <head> <style> input[type=’text’] { font-size: 24px; } </style> <script type=”text/javascript”> // A quick and dirty binary to denary converter in Javascript // I wrote it to use withContinue reading “Javascript Binary to Denary”
The real Computing in an Hour
OK, so the week before half term I had another of those moments where I found my mouth saying “ooh, let me volunteer to do all the things” while my head was screaming “IDIOT! You’ve already got too much to do!”. I’m pretty sure I have shoulder angels and demons. (And maybe a theme tune.)Continue reading “The real Computing in an Hour”
Four ways to kick start zombie coders
So… you’ve gone through if statements, for loops, recursion or whatever else you happen to be covering and everyone has completed the exercises, written the notes and smiled and nodded in all the right places. “Great!” you think, “I’ll set a programming task involving the thing I’ve just taught to consolidate this work”. You handContinue reading “Four ways to kick start zombie coders”
Arduino binary counting machine
I’ve been using the Arduino with my groups of Year 11 enthusiasts and we’ve been exploring together some of the tutorials and demo set ups, which is all reasonably exciting, but doesn’t really offer much of a progression. You wire up a circuit according to the diagrams, you download the code, you run it, itContinue reading “Arduino binary counting machine”
Code? Boom. 