Since we heard that we’d won the Primary School AstroPi competition, my Codeclubbers have been working on turning the idea – trying to detect the presence of an astronaut by the increase in humidity that they cause – into a working program.
Design
I was really pleased that of all the ideas that we submitted, this was the one that was chosen because I reckoned it would be the easiest to split down into individual functions. It seemed too complicated and time consuming to get every member of the club to write their own version in full, so by allocating individual elements to different children, I was able to try to match difficulty to ability.
To start off with, we generated a flow diagram of the various stages of the program, largely based on the pseudo-code that was submitted as part of our original paper entry to the competition. Pleasingly we found that this was fairly complete and most of the things we added were neat enhancements rather than modifications to the overall logic. Then we tried to identify which of these blocks would constitute a function in the code.
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