About the students

We designed this project so it would be suitable for students who are at least familiar with the core concepts of Python. But we don’t expect them to have used a webserver like Flask before, or made calls (in this case SQL) to an external service, or to have done any web development.

However we also anticipated that it’s increasingly common for some students in any given cohort to have considerable experience in some or all of these things.

That’s why we design the tasks and phases to be very flexible. It’s possible to offer a project that will encourage new programmers to make genuine progress building a thing that works, whilst also challenging more experienced developers to dive deeper.

Incidentally, web dev is great for this, because it applies so readily to examples in the online world with which students are already familiar… and almost every aspect of it affords fractal investigation. Just getting it to work is a viable target for a new programmer. But getting it to work securely with good UX design and accessibility concerns, not so easy. What about internationalisation? Left-to-right languages? And so on :-)

The Buggy Racing project was specifically for the Foundation students within the Computer Science department. This invites an especially wide range of experience — ranging from students with no programming exposure outside introductory classes, through to competent web developers, possibly with industrial experience, who might be on the course because they don’t have A-level maths. The project accommodates this range of ability by letting the students themselves decide how thoroughly they implement each task.