Creating a Revision Website From Scratch: A Start

 by Sarnaz Hossain

(image: Ilya Pavlov)

During lockdown, I have found myself guilty of procrastinating to great extremes. In order to combat this I decided to embark on a project which pulled together both an element of revision and my interest in computer science. Creating a revision website was on the top of my priorities and this short article will outline how I have started putting together the pieces to this project.

Firstly, I used my prior knowledge of html to set up the bare stripped back to the bone information that I wanted to be on my website. This started by creating different webpages for home, computer science revision, physics revision and maths revision. Then I added the title and a list of links to navigate between each website. After laying down the core html, I moved onto the css which is what allows websites to not just look like blocks of black and white text. With the css files I added, a background image to my website, a working interactive navigation bar which highlighted the current webpage you were on and added general structure to my website.

In addition to this I had to decide what I wanted the contents of the revision website to be. Either I could use it to be completely informative and include what is necessary from the syllabus content wise or I could create a way to generate past exam questions for topics picked by the user. The former being a lot simpler and the latter being a lot more challenging. I started creating just information for the subjects I am doing however the further and further I got into the project I became more and more inclined to take on the challenge of the exam question generator.

The method that i had devised to make this into a reality is using a checkbox to select what questions the user wants to generate questions for. Then use a premade database to pick out the questions with the tags that match the user input and output a random question from this bunch. However, with all things in Computer Science every step of this process is a complicated, research-heavy, stack-overflow necessary job which takes time and lots of patients. Creating the database, filling the database, keeping the tables in normal form, creating queries, learning PHP, managing outputs and dealing with sizes are just some of the things that I am amid understanding and will keep those who are interested up to date with my progress.

That is just a little peek into a journey that i have embarked upon in these dire days of lockdown. If you have any questions or interesting projects to share yourself don't hesitate to contact me at sarnaz.hossain21@pgs.org.uk.