Sprites vs polygons
Little look at why pixel graphics are making a comeback, but polygon graphics can look dated, even though they’re newer. A good excuse to stick to 2D pixel graphics for A-level projects!
Chinese Remainder Theorem – Mod meets magic
Mod (remainders: 7 mod 3 is 1. Meaning 7 รท 3 is 2 with 1 remainder) is essential for computer science. This video shows a magic trick which is essentially an maths formula utilising mod.
What Tricks Do Developers Use To Identify Game Pirates?
A look at some real games and techniques they used to stop piracy. And why DRM is bad.
Why 3D sucks
Explanation of why 3D technology hurts.
Internet across the Atlantic
This video is probably a bit long to show during the lesson on the Internet, but it’s a good video about how they got the different sides of the Atlantic connected. Goes all the way back to Morse code in 1937 and on to fibre optic internet.
Big-O notation
https://developerinsider.co/big-o-notation-explained-with-examples/ http://www.souravsengupta.com/cds2016/lectures/Complexity_Cheatsheet.pdf https://medium.com/@salmaeng71/big-o-notation-cheat-sheet-4a7e5632c93e Some interesting articles trying to explain Big-O notation. Insultingly enough video is Tom Scott on his series called “The Basics”. It’s a nice introduction to it if you don’t know Big-O notation, A-Level students need to be able to identify what complexity a given algorithm is, and order the different types from …. Read More
Graphing names
https://avikdas.com/2019/08/13/practical-computer-science-connected-components-in-a-graph.html This is very much for A-Level students. If you haven’t done graphs in Computer Science (yes, they’re different to plotting different points and drawing lines between them on graph paper), then don’t bother with this one. Otherwise, it’s quite a nice practical look at graphs and where they can be used. To find baby …. Read More
Code beautify
https://planetb.troye.io/ Perfect for making your code nice for putting onto OneNote or Word or an e-mail. Code beautify or code formatting. So you can format your Python code nicely.
Noughts and crosses matchboxes
So he’s made an AI for playing noughts and crosses. Out of matchboxes. Why not? Does anyone have any spare matchboxes we can borrow?
Passing functions as arguments with arguments
I appreciate this is a difficult one to describe, but things like Tkinter, PyGame or anything after a callback (calling another function when something happens) can throw up complications when you want to pass an argument. Consider the following line: threading.Timer(5, bar).start() That’s fairly straight forward that it’s calling the function bar after 5 seconds. …. Read More