May 2022

Code for Life Newsletter

The history of personal computers

A Kit-built Altair 8800 by Tim Colegrove

Personal computers are a relatively new invention, believe it or not! The very first one was the Altair 8800 which was released in 1975. These early personal computers weren’t very easy to use though and were only really used by electronic hobbyists. The Altair 8800 came as a build-it-yourself kit which involved soldering!

There was no keyboard, mouse or screen with the Altair 8800! You used switches to enter your program in binary and there were lights on the front for your output.

ZX Spectrum In 1982, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was released. This was a huge step forward and was much more accessible to home users. Many adults today had ZX Spectrum as their first computer and have built their love of programming and computers since then. This computer plugged into your TV. It had a tape drive for saving your programs, a little printer and you could even get a joystick for playing games.

Did you know?

The ZX Spectrum was programmed using BASIC. It was really easy to learn and I’m sure you can work out what this program does?

Check out some of these games you could play on the website torinak!

Can you rearrange these lines of Python code to count down?

The program should only output “Blast off!” once…

count = count - 1 
print(count) 
print(“Blast off!”) 
while count >= 0: 
count = 1

Solution here

Under the spotlight

Radhika Gudipati - Research Coordinator (Robotics & AI)

My role as a Research Coordinator is to interact with various technology teams within Ocado, understand their current challenges (e.g., what is the best route for an Ocado van to deliver the shopping to a customer) and collaborate with the research teams at Universities to develop a solution.

My biggest challenge is to find a solution and at the same time not give away the secret sauce to the competitors. I enjoy working with roboticists at different organisations. My PhD in robotics and my passion in taking the research to solve real world challenges brought me into this role.

Radhika Gudipati - Research Coordinator

"My first exposure to a computer was in my Yr 8 where a class of 50 students had to share 10 computers in a small room (air conditioned lab was the highlight for the hot tropical weather)."

COBOL was the language we were taught in the classroom and we were asked to handwrite the code in our homework books. As I typed the code in, executed it and saw the special characters printed in shapes appearing on the screen - it made my day! 🙂

Code for Life updates - your chance to have your say!

Renaming v to my_van

We have updated the variable in Rapid Router so that it makes more sense to the students. It should make your Python lessons easier to follow.

Bett Show 2022

Dioni Zhong and Laura Cumming (Code for Life Team)

Did any of you come and meet us at the Bett show this year? If so, let us know what you think of our resources so far by feeding back to us through the link below.

Gitbook Resources

Gitbook resources

It has been some time now since we moved our resources to Gitbook in order to improve your experience.

Scoreboard and tracking progress

Flexible scoreboard viewing

You told us that you needed more and we have responded. The new scoreboard allows you to select and focus on particular areas of Rapid Router and highlights areas which may need improvement. We will be updating the scoreboard further still to give you more flexibility and feedback on how your students are doing.

If you want to feedback on our resources or any of our updates, you can do so through this short survey.