LosOjos

Be careful there - lots of the Computer Science curriculum is about understanding how to solve problems using algorithms, a task which programming lends itself naturally to. HTML is a markup language, not a programming language. This matters because it's simply not possible to write an algorithm in HTML, which could cause you problems later on in the curriculum. Something like Scratch is great because it teaches the building blocks of programming without really having to worry about syntax (OK, you do need to understand why anything after an infinite loop will never run, but how you structure that loop is pretty much handled for you by Scratch's UI). Once you get them to understand that, then you can get them problem solving i.e. developing algorithms

Nobody better dare drive recklessly in DPRK, not even in a game!

You must right click on the actual word 'House' and select members; this will show all students as rows and all houses as columns. if you right click on the name of the house itself, you'll only see members of that house listed, and only that house listed as a column (which it sounds like you're doing).

You can't do it retrospectively (i.e. it will be effective from the date you input the house), but if you right click on the word 'House' in Pastoral Structure and select 'Members', you should see all of your students listed as rows, and your houses as columns, it's then just a case of putting a tick in the relevant box.

@PhilNeal [that should alert him to this thread]

Not done this with KS5 students in particular (though some have expressed an interest in my long-planned after school Code Club, so may do soon) but outside of work I've worked with 'kids' aged 10-18. Generally, I encourage self teaching, so I'll find out what interests them and then help them to find a good online tutorial to follow. The benefit to them is that I'm there to help them if they get stuck on specifics, plus they "learn how to learn". Benefit to me is I don't have to come up with a lesson plan that some will love and others will hate; they're all doing something they want to do. Of course I don't know everything so can't immediately answer every question, but I think that's a valuable lesson for them too - don't expect to know it all, just know how to find out.

You have to uncheck "Suppress Duplicates" on the "Default Output" section EDIT: also, if it's just the YTD total you want, the report will run much quicker if you use the Conduct > Total points" fields rather than subreports - you will need subreports if you want to filter it though

It can do totals for students, but AFAIK there's no way of doing it by group straight from SIMS without some manipulation in Excel afterwards

I'd set up a report under Focus > Student, then add in their ID (no need to add names unless you want to be able to drill down to that level of detail), house, year, tutor, then add "Total achievement points" from the "Conduct" area. Output type should be Excel, untick "Suppress Duplicates" Once in Excel, you can use a Pivot Table to summarise by whichever column you like. If you're handy with VBA, you can set up a report template to automatically pivot the data for you when the report is run in SIMS.

This is how I do it. There's a script scheduled to run on my intranet server which runs a SIMS report via CommandReporter and saves the output as XML, then runs an SQL Server script to import that data in to my own SQL Server DB (makes dealing with the data easier in your ASP.NET, you could equally use MySQL if you were going to use PHP/Ruby for instance). I'd seriously advise against accessing SIMS' SQL DB directly - if you accidentally mess something up, you won't be covered by standard support and the ad-hoc support provided by Capita to resolve your issues is likely to cost your school a hell of a lot of money. Aside from that, it's not a nicely structured DB to begin with and [apparently] changes regularly. Much better IMO to use CommandReporter, which is supported by Capita, and used SIMS' standard reporting engine to ensure your reports will continue to work between updates. Of course this will mean your data won't exactly be live, but you could schedule the report to run hourly if you like (I find nightly is adequate)

Not sure how to report this properly, so if anyone knows please do let me know. As anyone who has used SIMS extensively will know, there are a couple of memory handling issues in the system. For a DM like myself, this is most regularly witnessed when working on a large number of templates; eventually, the system crashes with an "Out of Memory" error, though this is quite a common error in SIMS. Well today I've spotted another memory handling issue I'd like to report to try to start cutting down on these types of crashes. When you run a batch photo import for students, SIMS appears to retain all of the photos in memory even after you close the routine. The only way to free up that memory is to close SIMS all together. This can be witnessed by starting a batch import, cancelling/closing the window, then trying to rename one of the photos in that import - you won't be able to until the next time SIMS has been completely closed, as it keeps the file in memory and therefore locked to editing. I appreciate this might not be one that causes problems often, but I dare say I'd hit another OOM error in an hour or so due to the file sizes involved when handling photos, so I'd just like to bring this to Capita's attention somehow in the hope of squashing at least one such bug

Thanks @vikpaw - any more for any more?

Possibly Coder Dojo's resources? ScratchTastic - Kata - CoderDojo

If you do have to use on camera flash, a fag paper makes a great diffuser (softens the light, making it less harsh and less prone to giving people shiny foreheads) and you can 'stack' them to control the diffusion amount.

Nothing at all wrong with striving and asking for improvement. I suspect what many who responded negatively took offense at was the "dog with a bone" approach, and almost smug "I know best" attitude that came across from your posts. Intentional or not, that's how some of your posts came across to me at least. Personally, I'd have been happy when the founder of the site acknowledged my issue and the developer not only acknowledged but offered a trial pending further developments already in progress; in fact, that's more than I'd have expected to receive in most places!

It's been that way for a long time by design; for security reasons, Chrome will not execute a link to a local file (I believe firefox is the same). The only workaround I know if is to use an extension like locallinks

@JRowley - you could always set up your own tech forum if you think you could do it better

Set up a webpage for said software, link in first post to webpage. When there's an update, you post about it, thread gets bumped to "what's new" and this alerts people to updates.

CR: #1410-1333004 Trying to create a CTF export to request ULN numbers, it occurred to me this task would be much simpler if there was a DOB filter on the CTF export routine - filter to students age 14+ with no ULN, export, done. Go vote! (please )

Automatically do you mean? You can filter by colour in Excel (from at least 2007 onwards) and copy/paste that way, but if it needs to be an automatic thing then it'll get a bit trickier... I guess you'd need to have the sheet 'refresh' at an interval (or add a button) and essentially do the filter/copy/paste action for you. I do have a basic function to help out when using cell colours, if it's any help to get you started. Add this code in to a module associated with the workbook, then you can use the function inside a worksheet just like you would any other Excel formula. It simply returns the integer associated with the selected cell's background colour. Public Function cell_colour(Cell_Check As Range) As Long cell_colour = Cell_Check.Interior.Color End Function Let me know if you want more help with this and I'll see what I can do

Nope, no shortcut Could have sworn I'd done it but must have just switched desktops.

There's definitely a KB shortcut, I did it last night... try SHIFT + WIN + Left/Right maybe?

Nothing in the window chrome but the keyboard shortcuts have been extended - Ctrl + Win + [Left/Right] will move a window to another desktop

I wrote this little macro a few years back for just that problem - you select the entire range of used cells in the column (not the whole column, otherwise the last entry will be repeated all the way to Excel's maximum row!) then run the macro: Public Sub fill_blanks_above() On Error Resume Next Dim x As Range For Each x In Range(Selection.Address) If x.Value = "" Then If IsNumeric(x.Offset(-1, 0).Value) Then If Left$(x.Offset(-1, 0).Value, 1) = "0" Or Left$(x.Offset(-1, 0).Value, 1) = " " Then x.Value = "'" & x.Offset(-1, 0).Value Else x.Value = x.Offset(-1, 0).Value End If Else x.Formula = x.Offset(-1, 0).Formula End If End If Next x End Sub Thinking about it now, it wouldn't be difficult to add in a statement to break the loop if it goes past the last used row so that you could just highlight the column and hit run. I may just do that! Also, "On Error Resume Next" is extremely bad practice for sloppy, lazy programmers like myself

@DataDB - we noticed that GPS is generally much higher than Reading, though we do have a few the opposite way around. There are very few cases for us where both levels are within a sublevel of each other. we have opted to average the two. Not ideal, but probably does lead to a more realistic target for LOP as we have many students who are for instance on a 3a for Reading, 5c for GPS, so a 4b is probably a realistic reflection of the student's ability. What we could really do with is some official guidance as to how the DfE are going to measure LOP - playing this guessing game is not helpful! While we're on the subject, how are you all calculating sublevels? I worked out the boundaries as best I could from our data (been unable to find official guidance) then simply split this up equally. These are the boundaries I'm using: Reading GPS 3c 12 25 3b 14 32 3a 17 38 4c 19 45 4b 23 48 4a 28 52 5c 32 55 5b 38 60 5a 44 65