• Skip to content
  • Skip to navigation
  • About Accessibility on our website

The adventures of teaching computing science to university students

  • Home
  • About
  • Open Data Sources
  • Advice for Job Seeking Students
  • Rails Pages
  • Python Development
  • Team Collaboration

Aberdeen CityLab! update

November 24, 2015

We had hoped to be launching the CityLab course in September. We didn’t quite manage to do that in the end. This was disappointing, but useful in the end as it offered more time to pull things together for the coming term in January. It also still means that we can run a pilot in order to see where and how we might be able to scale this up to larger numbers of students, while also having a more realistic idea of the time and effort involved in delivering the class.

A key change in the idea is that now students from both the University of Aberdeen and the Robert Gordon University will be collaborating together in teams on projects with Aberdeen City Council. We still need to iron out the basics of this as UoA starts two weeks ahead of RGU, but I’m sure that we will find a solution for the start and end of the term and projects.

While combining both RGU and UoA students together does mean that each institution can only offer this to ten students apiece each term, it does offer more opportunities for students to share their learning experiences in the course. Now they see how other students learn, while also learning how much they also know from their disciplines, and how combining inter-disciplinary teams works well when looking for creative solutions to problems.

CTC5 discussions

One hold up was getting permission from UoA to run this as a new course. While RGU has ‘independent study’ course options for students to use with this course, we don’t have that option at UoA. This means we need to propose a new course and fill in the usual forms that accompany this too. However, we were ahead of the usual cycle for this, so needed to find out about running a pilot. Happily we’ve now addressed the quality assurance concerns of the appropriate committee heads and should now be able to proceed apace with a course code and finding the students to take the course.

In order to make this work across the institutions we have set up a WordPress site to hold our materials and lay out the common syllabus and week planner for students. You can find this at https://citylababz.wordpress.com/, which will hold resources and materials about the course as well as updates about what projects are being worked on each term.

This has taken longer than expected, but is still just as exciting as we’ll be charting new areas for both institutions and leaving lasting results. All the while we’ll also be bringing design ideas to the people who need them in our institutions, as well as also spreading design ideas to students, who didn’t realise they needed them to help them develop better careers for themselves too.

  • web-team
  • citylab
Recent Posts
  • The Five Stages of Team Collaboration
  • Team Collaboration Book Available
  • Team Collaboration Introduction
  • Team Collaboration for Beginners
  • Facilitating Open Space for 700+ People – #SGVIE19
Recent Comments
  • StrategicPlay® Facilitation Training in Lego Serious Play – Bruce Scharlau on Thinking about Lego Serious Play and Simplex
  • The Agile Classroom – Bruce Scharlau on The Four Process Phases
  • New ‘learning by doing’ startup MSc begins September 2013 – Bruce Scharlau on Project based MSc Advanced Computing Science
  • My Play4Agile Story – Bruce Scharlau on Play4Agile 2013 Unconference
  • My Play4Agile Story – Bruce Scharlau on Reflections on ALE2011
Archives
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • July 2020
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • February 2019
  • November 2018
  • February 2018
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • February 2017
  • November 2016
  • February 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • December 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • May 2013
  • March 2013
  • January 2013
  • August 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • December 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
Categories
  • Coaching
  • Creative Problem Solving
  • Factory
  • Lego Serious Play (LSP)
  • Mac
  • Mobile
  • Public Engagement
  • RoR
  • Software Entrepreneurship
  • Software Project Management
  • Teaching
  • Team Collaboration
  • Uncategorized
  • Wordpress
  • Working World
Meta
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org
  • Privacy Statement
  • |
  • Accessibility
  • |
  • Freedom of Information
The University of Aberdeen is a charity registered in Scotland, No.SC013683