NEA computer science help

Personally I would say it's never a bad idea to get the basics down before you have to start. I did Comp Sci at GCSE as well as at A-Level, so I had a decent grasp of programming, but even so I still went over a couple of things that I knew I would have to get down for my project, and I'm pretty sure my teacher sent out some challenges to do (though I didn't actually have proper Comp Sci lessons in Year 12 so I can't say how much was discussed in class about doing it over the summer, a long story for another time ).

If you know what programming language your school uses, I would definitely recommend going over the basic stuff and if there's anything more complicated that you know you're going to be using - for instance, I did Python so I needed to learn Tkinter (and I'm sure there's another one but I can't remember lol) since a GUI is a necessary component of the project. So I just did some challenges to learn the different things I could do in Tkinter like buttons etc and wrote it down so it was less of a worry having to learn everything new. Of course, there's nothing wrong with having to find new things as you go along, I certainly did lol, but I would absolutely say that if you have time, see if you can find a challenge set or something that goes over anything you're unsure of and anything you know you're going to use, because it really helps to already be able to do some stuff when battling syntax errors for one in 500 lines of code (ahh, coding)

Hope this helps! (P.S. if you are using Python, I still have one or two pdfs of challenges that might help if you'd like )

I'm in year 12 and in the past month and a bit, we've been talking about what we want to do for our NEA project and we've started writing stuff down. They told us that in September forward, we'll be doing more programming in class for our project but they haven't told us if we need to do anything in summer.
I'm absolutely rubbish at programming and i mean rubbish - i have no idea what's going on half the time so i was going to plan everything out during the summer so when i come back to school, i understand what im doing.
None of my friends are sure if we should be programming now because everyone feels like we wont finish in time. Should i start coding now or just planning on what to do?

Also any tips and advice from anyone would be rlly helpful

omds thank you so much! yeah i'll definitely start part of it now. It would be great if you could send the challenges over! Thank you so much <33

How is your NEA now? I did the GCSE in CS and am currently doing the A level. I genuinely don't know how you are coping with A level Computer Science without having done any programming. I mean as part of the first paper, you have to complete programming challenges with the Skeleton Code which is a piece of badly written code (take it how you want it) written by the exam board and we have to answer questions on the paper through completing the programming challenges associated with it.

I hope that you have become better in the programming element. I felt the same as you with my NEA (except I had some programming experience with the basic stuff) as I had never created a GUI or anything of the sort. It took me some time to learn the modules, not to mention mixing in other commitments. I mean, at this stage, I'm still going with the write up process for my documentation (which I am aiming to complete over the extended weekend this week due to Friday being entrance exam day).

lol still struggling, everyone in my class is struggling and idk whether to feel relived or worried. All i've done so far is create a login and sign in page and then just a load of waffle for my documentation. idk how much guidance we're supposed to be having in our school but the teacher explains each section of the nea and then we write it but he's read some and apparently everyone hasn't been achieving high marks or even close to a good mark. Everyone just doesn't know what to do because the more they add, the more they feel like their repeating themself.
The deadline is on the 23rd of february so i'm not too worried but i dont think i will be able to complete the whole task - i didnt expect myself to anyway. I'm okay with coding questions as i can somewhat understand whats going on by putting pieces together but then it comes to actually creating code, i'm screwed. Oh well, i'm sat at my desk rn, about to do some more rip
It's whatever, I am getting more confident but it's not as if my speed is increasing

They can't give any guidance to your thing. They can say the major skills that your project will entail but will not tell you how to do it.

yeah exactly, bc they're not allowed to give alot of guidance - its hard to tell how good of a place we are at atm. Obviously theres literally nothing we can do abt it tho, its just confusing,