The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
It’s generally acknowledged that teamwork and communication skills are important skills for employability applicable to everyone. This includes everything from presenting posters and presentations, to writing reports, as well as how you work together with others to complete the project your reporting on to others. How one ‘works as a team’ seems to be something
We had Steve Aitken from Intelligent Plant speaking to a number of students last week covering all of the years from level one to five. He covered what the company does with its ‘app store’ for industrial plants, and how they focus on developing the store and having organisations build apps to monitor their factories
We had another good session on careers issues with the focus on CVs and cover letters. The basics were this: a) your cv should be adapted to each role you’re applying for, and tailored for those so that one for programming will look different from one for a business analyst role as you stress different
Today we started what will hopefully be a regular series of sessions with students to help prepare them for whatever they do after graduation. I wasn’t sure how many would come along. We had about 40, which was very good. The session had two goals: (a) find out who’s done what for their online profile,
There is no simple way to run a Raspberry Pi in an emulator so that you can learn some Arm assembler too. Yes, you can launch your Pi in VirtualBox, but it won’t let you also run assembler for an Arm architecture. So what to do? You go use Qemu emulator instead. This offers new
Taking part in the Silence Experiment at Agile 2017 made me more determined than before that running this type of session with students would be a good idea. Being offered the chance to start teaching our Human Computer Interaction course at the University of Aberdeen created an opportunity for me to ‘run the experiment’ and
We are all creative, but our culture seems to drum creativity out of us during school. The ‘arty’ ones go one way, the ‘science’ ones another, and the remainder end up distributed across all the subjects. This is brought up again, and again in articles. A key proponent of the notion that ‘school removes our
We all make decisions at basic and more advanced levels every day. At the basic level it will be about where to eat when meeting friends, while at the more advanced might be about where to go on holiday. On beyond that it could be about which career path to take, or whether that business
If learning something to professional level takes 10,000 hours, then it’s probably important to make time to practice the skills needed for that profession. It’s up to us as educators to facilitate practice experiences, which help our students do this. To that end, I’ve decided to do one less lecture each week for my course
While at #Agile2017 in Orlanda I was able to participate in ‘The Silent Experiment’ being run by Sal Freudenberg, Katherine Kirk , and Chris Corriere, as part of the Audacious Salon. I’d missed this in Edinburgh during it’s unveiling at Lean Agile Scotland, and had read about it in Sal’s ‘Inclusive Collaboration Experiments‘ book, where
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