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
A friend suggested reading Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when the Stakes are High and I found the book very useful. It offers strategies to help with those difficult conversations that we all need to do now and then, which are ones we need to do, but which we know will be difficult. I also
I’ve been working on a live project recently and found it necessary to see what was happening on the Heroku version as it was running differently from my development machine. Saying ‘it works on my machine’ doesn’t help the people trying to use the site, so I had to delve deeper and work out a
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
There are a number of books and online resources available explaining the background, and philosophy of Lego Serious Play. These break down into a few categories: the history, the theory and the manuals. I’ve not found any manuals, however, which explain everything. This means that in order to move beyond the basic approaches outlined in
Another year and another wonderful Play4Agile conference has happened. For me this was again an improvement on the last year. This is as much to do with the learning I’ve gone through since last year as it is about the mix of people, who were there. I just finished submitting my assignments for ILM Coaching Level 3
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
Yes, this is a late post, but I wanted to put the details somewhere I could find them as I’ve found a need for them a few times now. With the help of the city team bidding for Aberdeen as the city of culture for 2017 I helped put together an event for people to
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
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