The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
Monday sees the start of the next iteration of the group projects with real-world clients that was started last summer. In many ways those projects worked ok. We delivered usable products to clients and we are still working with one of them in ongoing work. What didn’t work so well were the engineering aspects of
I have now finished teaching ruby to beginning programmers in a mixed class of postgrads and first years students. All in all it went ok. However, there are some things that I will do differently next year. Using small jumps each week seemed to go ok. I used lots of images on the slides and
The student software factory is up and running. It’s on a volunteer basis with about four or five students meeting twice a week for about two hours each session. Some of them do a bit on the projects outside of this time, but not a great deal as they still have other committments for coursework,
While at the University of Kent in Cantebury last week for the HEA-ICS conference I had a chance to discuss some of the other programmes that offer students places in software houses either as part of their undergraduate programme, or as an extra job for which they need to apply for a place. At Kent
As part of sorting out the details of what to put into a mobile computing ‘roadshow’ for secondary pupils, I’ve been trying to find links to materials about the impact of mobiles in the developing world. Some of them will fit into the page and the later acccompanying slideshow rather well, and that’s good. The
The other week as part of the summer conversion MSc group project preperations I took the Measurable Value case study by Ryan Shriver and turned it into a working example that the students needed to work through. This exercise worked, but could’ve been better. Ryan also gave me permission to make use of his example
s part of the training and workshops I organised for the group projects I’m running this summer I decided to see how some of the ‘games’ would work in conveying agile prinicples to the students. I tried James Shores ‘Offing the Off-site Customer‘ and the ‘Lego XP Game‘ last week. Both went reasonably well I
The last week has seen a flurry of activity in the Ruby and Rails world where there is a buzz about geting newbies up and running easily. Some of these are new ones, while others have been around for a little while but as I’ve not come across them before I wanted to make sure
As part of a module on the MSc Software Project Management programme I had my students write an essay comparing a work breakdown structure for the iteration of a project and the approach taken for ‘business value delivery’ described by Ryan Shriver in his Measurable Value with Agile article. This produced some interesting results amongst
I was speaking to a friend, who’s doing an English degree at Dundee University on Saturday, and she was telling us about how she didn’t have any exams this term and what they were doing instead. For her Vision in Film course they do weekly ‘journals’, which are 500 word essays on some aspect of
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