It is all very well asking students to solve real-world problems, and it’s true that often they do a good job of it. But I think there is a lot to be said for identifying and solving trivial problems, or at least problems that are not intended to be taken entirely seriously.

The Homework Excuse Management System, for example, (pictured above) was a spreadsheet I devised to tell me if a student had used the same excuse more than once for not handing their homework in on time. Now, it’s easy enough to keep track of that sort of thing using a combination of pen and paper, a good memory, and the teacher stare, so I didn’t need a spreadsheet. But while the problem itself was trivial, the computerised solution wasn’t. Therefore, in attempting to come up with a more or less automated system, I had to work out how to:

“Tell” the spreadsheet to look up a student’s current excuse against a list of excuses;
Check if the student had used the same excuse before;
Insert a sad face if they had;
Keep track of how many times each student had “tried it on”.

Over time, I built up my own personal library of spreadsheet utilities, such as:

A macro that would insert named sheets from a list of names on the first page: very handy for generating a separate worksheet for each student in the class;
A macro that created an index, with hyperlinks, of each sheet in a workbook (the inverse of the proceeding one, in effect);
A macro that created a summary of information drawn from various parts of the spreadsheet.

Whenever I needed to create a spreadsheet for a serious project, I could usually find a bit of code that I had written for a “trivial” purpose, and put it together with other similar bits of code, to create a pretty high-functioning solution.

So, getting students to work out how to do particular small, narrow jobs using code, even though there is no overall grand purpose like saving the world, can actually be very useful.

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