Week 847

Week beginning Monday, 7th April 2025.

Experience CS

We’ve been joined by Seb Jacobs to provide some additional development support on the Experience CS project this week. We worked with Seb back in the early days of FutureLearn and it’s good to have the opportunity to work with him again.

We’ve made some changes to our version of the Scratch editor so that it works better on the small screen widths we’ve been told to expect from the students that we’re hoping to attract to Experience CS.

We’ve made progress splitting the Scratch editor into a Rails Engine to better separate the containing Experience CS Rails app from the MIT Scratch editor. We did something similar in Code Club World and now feels like the right time to do it again in this project. We’re keeping half an eye on being able to consolidate these two separate Engines, and possibly use the Scratch editor elsewhere within RPF in future.

We’re also making progress on being able to save and load Scratch projects to a user’s Raspberry Pi account.

We’re continuing to work with the learning team to ensure the product we’re building best supports the curriculum content they’re creating.

RubyForge redirects

I had a good session pairing with Marty Haught from Ruby Central to make progress on the RubyForge redirects project. Marty configured Fastly so that we could check that it was working as expected in preparation for switching DNS in the (hopefully) near future.

The rest

It’s Easter school holidays and my partner and I have been sharing childcare duties with our daughter so I’ve not been around so much this week.

James spent an impromptu couple of days in Scotland with an old friend from his time in Antarctica 🏔️

Chris finished early on Friday to celebrate his birthday 🎉. Happy birthday, Chris!

Until next time.

– Chris