A Halcyon Tech Blog

This was another fun one brought about by Covid. Every year we have a "Mentoring Day" at the school. On these days, there are no lessons and students only come in (ideally with their parent(s)/guardian(s)) for their pre-booked meeting slot with their tutors to discuss how everything is going and set targets for the rest of the year. With the added complication of them being on remote learning at the time, we couldn't even go through the questions with them easily. So the compromise was to send the questions to the parent/guardians in advance, then on the day they would have a five minute video chat with the tutors to go through their answers and set their goals. To make this easier for the staff, the questions would be sent using Google Forms and then put together into a concise Word document for each student with their answers and targets that could be uploaded to our Student tracker system.

(Not real data) This was my first "big" coding project at the school. The mission, as given to me, was to create a way for teachers to get a succinct, one page overview for each of their classes, with all the breakdowns required for their data analysis. At the time, I had not yet begun to learn Python and most of my programming experience was in Visual Basic, Java, PHP and Javascript. As the data was Excel-based, my immediate thought was to use Visual Basic as I could then have the option of developing it into a full plugin in future (which was actually done by a colleague later on).