Coding Club: Black Flag

Overview

Following on from working with Cambridge University Press on the GCSE Computing site, we were delighted to be involved in working on another project in the same curriculum area.

Black Flag: A Coding Club mission is a fiction book produced by CUP aimed at teenagers in Key Stage 3. CUP describe the book as follows:

"In Black Flag - A Coding Club Mission, your problem solving skills are tested as you join Cal on a dangerous adventure into the underground world of the anarchists who are fighting to restore freedom to the citizens of New Edgehill. Explore the companion website to complete the puzzles introduced through the chapters and don't forget to use your rig data for hints and support. If you have completed Python Basics then you will have studied all of the necessary programming skills needed to solve the challenges. Good luck and keep your eyes open!"

We were engaged to produce the companion website, which would provide a series of puzzles, all themed around the world painted in the book. All of our team were very excited to work on this project with such interesting subject matter.

Approach

We carried out this project using our standard process for projects of this type. Briefly the stages of the project were:

• Design - using the influences and excellent artwork from the book, we came up with the concept of basing the 'headquarters' for the puzzles around the rig from the book.
• Template conversion - once we had signed off design, we created static HTML templates for all pages. The site is fully responsive and suitable for use on mobile phones, tablets or computers and at this stage we thoroughly browser tested on a variety of devices and browsers.
• Concrete5 integration - once all templates were in place, we then produced a series of custom block types within the concrete5 Content Management System to allow population and editing of content through the WYSIWYG interface.
• Content implementation - all puzzles and page copy were implemented in-house using the concrete5 system.
• Testing and deployment - Once the site was complete, we carried out a series of thorough tests based on our previously agreed testing plan. Technical, editorial and usability tests are just some of the areas visited. On completion of all of this, the site was deployed.

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