As I am apart of Young Coders MeetUp, I had the opportunity to be a part of Code Grades. Code Grades is a weekly coding session run by Nic Tollervey who is a British software developer. Every Friday we would gather at a venue in central London and have a session.
Code Grades were similar to Music Grades, levelling up by applying the knowledge and skills needed for each grade to your own fun, interesting and challenging coding projects.
Each session would cover a different element of python every week. I really enjoyed Nic’s style of teaching: he would explain a concept to us, set a challenge and the following week we would all present our different interpretations and solutions to the challenge. It allowed creativity from each person, taught you many different techniques and challenged you too.
An example of one of the first challenges we completed was a simple game of FizzBangPop. The rules were simple – players take turns to count incrementally, replacing any number divisible by three with the word “fizz”, and any number divisible by five with the word “buzz”, and any number divisible by both with the word “pop”. At first, although the rules were simple, I wasn’t sure how to approach the problem. However, Nic introduced the concept we would have to utilise in the challenge.
He introduced Modulus (%) – The modulus operator in python returns the remainder of a division of one number by another. From there, we all had to individually find solutions to the problem ready to present later. After a bit of head scratching, I came up with a solution. Every multiple of 5 when divided by 5 returns a remainder of 0, and every multiple of 3 when divided by 3 returns a remainder of 0. Then every number that is a multiple of 3 and 5 when divided by 15 returns a remainder of 0. After figuring out the logic, the coding was straightforward especially as Nic had introduced modulus.
Every session brought new challenges and made us think harder each time. We ran code grades 3 times and it lasted 6 weeks each time. I was able to co-ordinate one round of Code Grades. It involved organising menus for people to eat, sending weekly emails to let everyone know about the sessions and working with the Tate Exchange to make sure we had everything we needed to deliver the session.
I am very grateful to Nic for running the sessions as the python sessions really supported my Computer Science GCSE Python work and allowed me to have more knowledge of python.
Mutsa Pearl 