Sunday 11 February 2018

Python Challenges Major Update

The Python Challenges site that I run has been through a major overhaul over the last 2 months, including a rewrite of most of the code providing interactivity.

A part of the reason for doing this is that Awesome Table are now charging for anything above 1,000 views per month and the fees are more than I can afford for what is a free site. Its a great tool, but I can't afford to spend on something I give away for free...

So I used this opportunity to update the site and rethink how it works. Initially I wanted to replace Awesome Table with some custom written javascript. (You can see this on the AS page) but I soon realised that this was a good opportunity to hand curate the important challenges and make them more engaging.  So both the iGCSE and A2 pages have been written by hand to give them a more individual flavour.

To make my life simpler, I now simply publish the master list of challenges directly from Google Sheets, it may not be quite as nice, but its quick, simple and Google aren't likely to charge me for the service in the near future.

Despite these challenges, the Website now feels more mature with hand curated challenges that really engage students and the A2 pages in particular have benefited from some new challenges created by my students.  I was very pleased to see the work that Jonathan and Sam have done on Prolog and Object Oriented challenges.

I hope you enjoy the new version of the site and please contribute by making comments below and sharing your thoughts!

The link is: http://pythonchallenges.weebly.com/