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.
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
Battleship Algorithm
An introduction to algorithms. You can use algorithms to solve most tasks, this video looks at the optimum algorithm for winning a game of battleships.
Globals
The problem with globals, and why you should use subroutines When you’re writing something like a binary converter it isn’t too bad, but the code can start to get messy, with whole chunks of the program being in loops and things like that making tweaks and debugging more tricky. When you start writing a program …. Read More