Grumpy Computer Science Teacher

Good luck to everyone getting their BTEC results today

Having fun with @Adobe who are insisting it’s not possible to stop my account auto-renewing when the subscription ends (at a significantly higher price, of course)

External training day, and I have secured the only pack of custard creams. I suspect I’ve already hit maximum achievement for the day!

I’ve spent most evenings for over a week trying to build this timer! A combination of bad luck and incompetence (by me), and all I have to show for it is two broken Arduinos, a broken LED matrix, lots of broken cables, and several solder burns. Feeling very annoyed with myself 😡

A few years ago, I built this countdown timer for my classroom. An Arduino, a rotary encoder, an LED matrix, and some Ethernet cable. It’s proven to be one of the most useful things in my classroom! Recently, I said I’d make one for my colleague. No problem. Or so I thought…

Student revision for all six units of work for OCR J836 Cambridge National in IT R050 are now on my website. #EduTwitter #TeamCompSci computingrevision.net/j836-cambridge…

Some time ago, I created “dual-coding” worksheets for GCSE Computer Science. Now I’ve done the same for J836 R050 IT. I hope students and teachers find them just as useful #TeamCompSci #EduTwitter tes.com/teaching-resou…

7. Moaning about switching to USB C? Remember when every phone brand (or model) had a unique connection? This is from a Sony Ericsson T68

6. External hard disk drive. This was considered “portable” (the pound coin’s for scale). An enormous 2 gigabytes of storage though. SCSI connection just to add to the fun of portability! #RetroComputing

5. iomega Zip Drive. Storing 100 megabytes on a single removable disk was a big step up from 1.44 Mb on a “normal” 3.5” disk. This is the SCSI version #RetroComputing

4. Goldstar VCR. NICAM Stereo, VideoPlus+. Very expensive at the time. Whatever happened to Goldstar? They merged with Lucky to become LG Corporation. Life’s Good 😎

3. #Commodore64 games on tape and disk. I doubt any work. My C64 tape deck works, but not the 1541 disk drive #RetroComputing #retrogames

2. Roku / Pinnacle / Slim SoundBridge Network Music Players. Not one, but three of them! Music stored on my NAS or internet radio would be piped into my stereo. Cool when it worked. Now replaced by Smart Speakers and Spotify #RetroComputing

1. Amiga A500 User’s Manual. I already knew the box was here, and the actual #Amiga is in my study. Didn’t expect to find the manual though

Clearing out my garage and finding all sorts of interesting gadgety things. Some will be saved, others will be going to Robot Heaven. I’ll post some of them here, whilst trying not to get too distracted

@MrWalker_CS I also made this website to accompany my resources (not finished yet though) computingrevision.net

@GrumpyCompSci Is there anywhere I can purchase the resources? We are starting this course next academic year, and struggling to find resources for it @GrumpyCompSci

As I near the completion of creating the entire scheme of work for OCR J836 IT R050, I wondered how many images I’ve drawn to illustrate it. A whopping 177 images! No longer it’s taken so much time! #TeamCompSci #EduTwitter

@MrWalker_CS Here’s a link to mine on TES. There aren’t many resources out there, but the Clear Revise books are good and KnowItAll Ninja is used for setting homework tes.com/resources/sear…

All OCR J836 Cambridge National in IT schemes of work for R050 are now on TES #TeamCompSci #EduTwitter tes.com/resources/sear…

@TsuiAllen @computermuseum Nice. My C64 is in my office and still working (last time I checked). The Speccy’s long gone though

@GrumpyCompSci Yep @GrumpyCompSci This was me in August 2025 @computermuseum

When you see your first computer in a museum… #old #RetroGame