Well done to all the students (and teachers!) who worked so hard to prepare for the first ever on-screen practical python exam as part of the reformed Edexcel GCSE in Computer Science.
Live.withcode.uk was launched in 2020 to provide free practical python activities and resources for teachers and the first season went live during lockdown. The aim was to give short live coding videos supplemented by accessible, interactive and competitive online challenges.
Season 2 went through 20 python basic skills and was aimed at Y10 students in their first year of the GCSE and Season 3 went through practice exam questions for the on screen Edexcel GCSE python test.
This week I’m launching Season 4 of live.withcode.uk. All episodes (and past seasons) are freely available at live.withcode.uk
With the new term under way, my students have asked for some more support with some of the more complex skills at GCSE such as:
- loading data from a file
- processing data in 2d lists
- displaying data formatted in a table
- creating procedures and functions and using them effectively
With this in mind, Season 4 will focus on these (and other) skills that tend to feature on questions 4, 5, and 6 in the on screen tests, starting with a miniseries which uses turtle graphics to plot a pie chart about different types of pie:
I’m going to be assigning Season 3 (basics) activities to my Y10 classes and both Season 3 and 4 to my Y11 classes (they had Season 3 last year but may find a recap helpful).
If your school has set up an account to enable you to track progress as your students compete against each other then you can edit your groups so that they subscribe automatically to Season 3 via the Python weekly competition page or Season 4 via the Y11 weekly python competition page, or you can add them manually via live.withcode.uk
Please get in touch if you have any questions or if you want your school’s data to be removed from the compete.withcode.uk page.
All the best for the year ahead.
