For my creativity section of CAS, I did Coding with Pav which is an outside of school programming course I took over lockdown and all the way up to the start of school, and for my initial reflection, I am going to choose learning outcome number 2 which is to demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process. I found it hard to start off with as it is in a way a completely new language to me that I have never learned or worked with before. That’s why it took me some time to get used to what it actually was I was working with throughout this course. However, I was soon able to see that what I had chosen to do was actually something that really interests me. In the first couple of sessions, I was able to learn a lot of the basics of python programming and understand how coding works on a broader level. As I am taking computer science in IB this has been a really good intro to coding even though throughout the course we looked at Python whereas in school we are focussing on JavaScript. Although these are different coding languages they still both have a lot of things in common when it comes to coding. I started off not being able to understand anything but then I would do a little extra work here and there from the course at home to make sure that I fully understood what was going on and this really helped me overcome a new challenge whilst giving me new transferable skills for the future. There were other participants from around the world who had a bit more experience than me and that is also why it was key for me to do a little extra work when not on a zoom call.
Here is some of the code from one of the initial lessons I have had:
