The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
As described earlier, I want to create a viable software house experience for students as part of their group projects. Similar projects have been done in the past, and are being done in other universities. The time is right to do this in Aberdeen too. We need to recruit more students, and that can more
Saw Scott Chacon do a great talk at Scotland on Rails, which convinced me that Git would be more useful than subversion for students to use with projects. It looks a breeze on *nix or Mac, but less so on Windows. The immediate goal is to get Git installed on the department server so that
Getting ready for Scotland on Rails in Edinburgh from Thursday to Saturday. I’m giving a presentation on Friday about teaching Rails. Ran it by the person currently teaching the MSc conversion students Ruby, and he thought it fine, and mentioned that he was real pleased with how it’s been going. The students are learning lots,
Students, especially the MSc students, are always wanting to have industry related projects. One way to do this is to get industry to come to us for software projects. This will not happen overnight however. I’m sure the other universities who’ve done this also started small. Some sound impressive, and are relevance to what we might
The iphone and googlephone assualt on the rest of mobileland is having an effect. It seems that the other mobile handset OEMs are now gathering behind a proposed tool for building mobile apps based on Eclipse. It will hopefully work well and integrate some of the web features available for iphone development under Aptana, which
I put together a draft proposal for getting more student projects tied to ‘real world’ experience developing applications to the post grad teaching and learning committee, and it went down well. We’ll start small and try a pilot for the summer projects with a number of students. This will let us iron out the details
Ok, so Java is less important than setting up the macbook to use my mobile as a modem using Bluetooth. I don’t use this feature often, but now and again it is handy when you just get onto the train, and realise that the file you wanted to work on is still on the file
The Rails stuff is all in now. I’ve also added in some basic ‘stuff’ which I’ve found works well too on a Mac for doing the odds and ends of development. Looking across the menu bar below I see these, which are all used at one point or another. These all supplement the built-in apps
ImageMagick now works fine thanks to the instructions noted in part three. Hurrah. I just added all of the export statements to my .bash_profile file, and all was well. If you don’t have a .bash_profile file, then create one, but be sure to have it start with the ‘.’ or it won’t work. That’s a
Still not got to MySQL, but am working on ImageMagick via Macports. It’s taking forever… While it’s been busy downloading this and that, I’ve been able to reactivate php, which is already installed in Leopard, but just commented out the of the httpd.conf file. I also put phpmyadmin under my ‘sites’ directory so that when
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