The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
Introduction Every summer since June 2010 I have been working with teams of students, who are working with clients to build them a piece of software. They take everything they’ve learned about building software applications, and apply that to this project with a team of five or six students. This has had many ups and
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
Last week I facilitated the open space for between 700 and 750 people of the 950 attendees at the Global Scrum Gathering in Vienna on 29 October 2019. This is a brief guide to what happened, what went into the process, and what I learned from the event. What happened On the day it all
This week our industry seminars heard from a range of students, who’ve been on placements with companies. Some were gone for a year, while one went for two summers to the same company. They all shared some common perspectives of their experience. First, the company knows that you’ll not have lots of technical knowledge, so
This week we had Alisdair McKibben talking about how to use LinkedIn. He explained the basics of why you should maximize your benefits with good selection of words and photo. You can find more on this in the careers section of the university website https://www.abdn.ac.uk/careers/resources/index.php?action=search&search_term=linkedin. For most students this is something to regularly update during
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,
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
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