Check out the student work submitted for real-world industry feedback! Learn more about submitting student work to receive real-world feedback here!

Grade: High School

PLTW Course: Computer Science Essentials

Submission type:  Activity: Zombie Apocalypse

Project overview: Computer Science Essentials introduces students to coding fundamentals through the block-based programming of apps. Students continue to sharpen their computational thinking skills by transitioning into text-based programming side-by-side with blocks, and finally into text-based programming in the Python® programming language.

In the Zombie Apocalypse project, students are tasked with designing a program that will calculate how much food and water a person needs to survive a zombie apocalypse.

Select student submission materials:

Link to full project: click here

Select judge feedback: “Hi, thank you for submitting your Zombie Apocalypse project!  I work at BAE Systems in Burlington, MA as a Technology Development Manager. At BAE, I get to develop algorithms for satellites to help satellites operate in Low Earth Orbit.

Great job creating your presentation and graphical user interface! I loved how you were able to create multiple screens, allowing a user to see more information once they entered in their name. That was a very impressive addition, and something that I had not previously seen! I also enjoyed how you created a very detailed presentation, including excellent descriptions of the intricate code blocks to allow the user to quickly understand your design choices.

In addition, I thought you did a great job creating individual functions to calculate the required MREs and water. You had an innovative way of linking together all of the information, and I think you have a great future ahead of you in software development!

For your next iteration, one thing you can consider adding are “classes” to group information together for a single individual. Consider having an Adult class and a Child class, where you have class variables equal to Name, Role, and Age. This would help you keep track of the data that gets populated, and it could help you track whether a specific individual survived the zombie apocalypse.

Overall, great work and thank you for all of the time you put into your project! Amazing job.”

-Development Manager, BAE Systems

“Hello, I work for BAE Systems where I am a Systems Engineer. I think overall this was a great implementation of identifying a person’s needs during a Zombie Apocalypse!

Your design document shows that you are meeting the requirements for user input and program output. The design diagram looks great! It is easy to follow the flow and I am impressed that you used actual flow chart symbols. Nice!

Great use of the screen space. Keeping the text area plain makes it easy to read the text and see where to input the data. The enter and reset buttons are large and clear, making it easy to press. Also liked the personalized message to the user. Nice touch.

I did not see any information about initializing the data or what happens when the user presses reset. That would be good to add to your design documentation and presentation.

It looks as though you put a lot of effort and thought into the app and the presentation. Keep up the good work.”

-Systems Engineer, BAE Systems

Industry Award: 2nd Place High School Computer Science Project

School: Carver Middle High School

Teacher: Erin Young