The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
I participated in Volume 10 Pecha Kucha Night Aberdeen and talked about engineering collisions for student experience. While the topic came to me easily, it was surprisingly harder than I thought it would be to craft ‘the story’ that held the slides together in a way that didn’t feel like a lecture. The titles for
In March 2014 I ran a workshop on developing student-run software houses for the HEA at London Metropolitan University in London. The day was broken into two halves with the morning devoted to short case studies with plenty of time for questions, and an afternoon of hands-on workshop starting with Strategic Play session using Lego
People attending this years’ Play4Agile 2014 were asked to blog their answer to these simple questions: Who or what brought you to Play4Agile in the first place? I saw Olaf post a tweet about the first one in 2011 and started following Katrin then too, but couldn’t make it. I was able to meet both of them
There’s been a lot of writing on this of late so it seems a good time to pull some of these thoughts together. There is the ‘everyone should learn to code’ camp as shown by Emma Mulqueeny, who runs Rewired State and Young Rewired State, because it helps to form logical problem solving skills and
Books tell stories to teach us important lessons in a variety of ways. Many ‘howto’ type books tell us what to do in a logical, linear path from beginning to end. Some of these might have quizzes and exercises that help us to learn the materials. Portia Tung’s book The Dream Team Nightmare uses a different device to help
While the new degree will bring together lean startup and service design, an important part will be agile development too, so that students know how to use good practices to build quality software. All three of these goes well together. A key goal of the new MSc Software Entrepreneurship is to appeal to those, who
The new ‘learn by doing’ MSc has gained approval and will start this September with a second group starting in January. While the degree idea I’ve been pursuing for a while didn’t end up being one where teams would work on projects for other businesses, which is what I thought would be most useful, this
I was at Play4Agile the unconference for games and playing to help teams better perform again this year. This is full of about 80 agile coaches and others interested in using games to learn. I shared a room with @sven_kr, which was nice as I’d not seen him since last year. It was also good
I did an intro to test driven development (TDD) talk for TechMeetup Aberdeen last night and started with the ‘simple TDD game‘. I modified the game based on comments there, and made a few changes of my own. I used 2×4 Lego bricks as ‘rulers’ to be the ‘testing tool’ as this was easier than
The agile classroom in the university should be a cohesive concept that forms a thread through the student’s degree. As the student learns more in the classroom through a mixture of lessons and exercises, there should also be opportunities to use this knowledge in the wider community of the university and its local community. After
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