Our mission is to provide a website aimed at students in years 7-11 which encourages them to learn how to program and shows them the ropes.

We feel that programming is a fantastic skill to have and it is an unfortunate fact that today, the number of people taking computing A level and degree is rapidly declining, yet the requirement for computer scientists is going up. We think that part of the problem is that people have no prior knowledge of programming before they make A level choices and so do not realise how valuable it can be. Therefore, we hope with our website, we can get younger students to start programming and increase the number of people who get involved with computing.

We aim to use tidy pages, along with a consistent style, in order to allow the students easy navigation throughout our website, along with a appropriate colours, to make our site easy to use. Where appropriate we have used images in order to assist the students' understanding of our material.

We have chosen to base our website on Kid's Programming Language (KPL) and Object Pascal. We chose to use KPL as it is specifically designed to teach programming to students in our target age group. It allows easy understanding of complicated computing concepts in a fun environment, producing games, which we feel is an enjoyable way to learn programming.

As well as KPL, we choose to have a section on Object Pascal. The reason for this is that it is a more 'professional' programming language, which is obviously far more powerful and versatile than KPL. However, Pascal was originally designed as a teaching program language, making it ideal for use on our website. We choose to use Lazarus as the IDE for Object Pascal, because it is free (unlike Borland's Delphi) however it still has all the desired features.

This website fits into our school activities well, as we run a Games Programming Club at our school at lunchtime for years 7-11. Normally there are about 25 people who come each week. At the club, we use KPL, however we are looking at the possibility of extending to teach some Object Pascal to some of the more advanced students. At the club, students normally follow our worksheets and resources, which allow them to explore different areas of KPL, many students then go home and use what they have been taught and their own research to create their own games, which they often want to share. That is why we created a code database.

We have also, thanks to our teacher, Dr Bond, been lucky enough to have been on various computing trips this year:

• Microsoft Research Conference - the three of us wrote essays on the political nature of the world wide web, to win a place to the Microsoft Research Conference. At the conference, hosted at Cambridge University, we heard all about the future of computing. Before going on the trip, we created a poster of 'The Computer of The Future', for a competition. The lecturers thought that our poster was the best and so we won £1000 for our school
• Sir Tim Berners Lee Lovelace Lecture - our teacher, Dr Bond, managed to get tickets for Sir Tim Berners Lee's Lovelace lecture, one of the highlights of the year for the BCS.
• Ruby On Rails Oxford University Trip - recently we attended Oxford University computing department, to hear from the technical director of New Bamboo about the Ruby On Rails architecture. After the speech, we all think that Ruby On Rails is going places!