New tool for teachers - codeWOF

We've just released a first version of a tool to help you strengthen your programming skills and maintain your coding "warrant of fitness". We'd love to get your help trying this out.

codeWOF is a free website developed by the University of Canterbury Computer Science Education Research Group in partnership with DTTA to enable teachers and students in New Zealand to practise and maintain their programming skills. codeWOF provides you with short exercises to complete daily because your programming skills (just like any other skill) need regular use in order to stay strong.

Currently we offer Python questions, and we would like to support Scratch and other programming languages in the future. The exercises are intended for people who have used Python before, but are not yet fluent. It is not for learning how to program, but simply to regularly exercise what you already know.

Lucy Turner, a student at the University of Canterbury, is completing her Honours year in Computer Science and is performing a study that analyses the effectiveness of the types of problems that are selected for you to complete on codeWOF. The results of this study will influence the types of questions that codeWOF will provide in the future. Lucy would really appreciate it if you would enrol in the study so that she has things to write about in her Honours report. 

To participate in the study:

1. Log in or sign up to the codeWOF website as a teacher.

2. Enrol in the study by clicking “Maintaining Programming Skills: Use of an Online Practice Tool for Python” research items from your dashboard, then read and agree to the information and consent forms.

3. That’s it! Just come back each day to complete one or two daily programming exercises.

Participation in this study is voluntary - you can use codeWOF regardless of whether you choose to participate in this study or not. If you have any questions feel free to email Lucy at ltt19@uclive.ac.nz.

We expect there may be bugs as this is a new venture for us. If you find any, please let us know through the contact form on the website, or by emailing csse-education-research@canterbury.ac.nz.

We hope this tool can help serve teachers and students throughout New Zealand in an engaging and meaningful way. We have several features in the pipeline already, including points and badge collection being developed by Maree Palmer, a 4th year Software Engineering student at the University of Canterbury.

Thanks,

Tim Bell, Jack Morgan, Gerard MacManus, Lucy Turner, Maree Palmer

The codeWOF team