Building a digital project end to end
Computer Science · Key Stage 3 · The School
Plan before you build
A digital artefact — a site, a game, an app, a data visualisation — starts with who it is FOR and what it must do. Sketch the screens on paper first; changing paper costs nothing and changing code costs an evening. Decompose into parts you can finish and test one at a time, rather than building everything and debugging it all at once.
Test with someone else
You cannot test your own interface, because you know where everything is. Give it to someone in the audience, set them a task, and WATCH without helping. Where they hesitate is a design fault, not a user fault. Two testers find most of what is wrong; asking whether they liked it finds almost nothing.
Other people’s work and data
Images, music, fonts and code carry licences. Use your own, or work licensed for reuse, and credit it — "found on the internet" is not a licence. If your project collects anything about a person, collect the minimum, say what you are collecting, and do not collect what you do not need. These are habits worth forming now, because they are legal duties later.
Build the quiz game part by part. Write part 1 — load the questions — then TEST it by printing them out. Write part 2 — ask one question — test it. Only then write part 3. Each bug is found while you still remember writing the code and while there is only one new place it could be. Write all six parts first and your first run has six candidate causes for every failure.