The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
As some of you know I’m into the whole Lego for teaching thing and have used it for a few years in some games with students, and that you can find some of the bricks in my office. Some of you may have also noticed that since last September my laptop has a ‘Play Changes!
Vagrant for classroom inspired by http://www.slideshare.net/ctrabold/2011-1029-ctraboldrailscamphh https://twitter.com/ctrabold at the 2011 Hamburg Railscamp http://railscamp-hamburg.de/ which I saw from the twittersteam of the event. The goal of the project is to setup Vagrant to launch a linux VM that will run Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3 for use by students without the attendant issues that accompany them
The PM Camp Aberdeen event for project managers ran on Saturday, 26 November 2011 at the University of Aberdeen, as noted on the sign up page at http://pmcampaberdeen2011.eventbrite.com/. We had a dozen people in the end. There was a mixture of people like myself, who ran some projects, to several consultants from Logica who ran
The Aberdeen Software Factory is now about a year old. I was running events under this title for longer, but about a year ago we put the paperwork in place to take paid consultancy work. As an ongoing means to find work for students, both paid and unpaid, the ASF did fine. We had three
See the update from 4 November at the bottom of the post I’m thinking we need to have a project managers open space day. There seem to be plenty of unconferences for developers and coaches to attend, but I’ve only seen one in Austria that a friend is helping to organise in a few weeks
For the last year or so I’ve been looking on and off at Lego Serious Play (LSP). I’ve been thinking about two aspects of LSP. First, I’ve been wondering how I could bring it into my university classroom with students. Second, I think it could be a useful addition to the range of skills available
The university aspect I went to ALE2011 looking for a chance to meet and talk to like-minded practioners, thinking that I would come home with more ideas to use in my teaching. Although I knew it was an unconference and I’d been to a few Scotland BarCamps a few years ago, and found them useful,
Finally got around to reading Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt and wish I’d read it sooner. Go buy it now for your Kindle or iPad, or whatever. I’ll wait. While I was pleased to see that I’ve been doing some of the things he suggests already, and had realised some
Watched System based improvement videos of Russell Ackoff and followed up with his book The Art of Problem Solving in the library as his work seems so similar to that of Deming and others. This slim little book (library had original 1978 edition) is very useful read to understand more about solving problems and fits
Come to the event at the University of Aberdeen and use open data to make government work better for you. Come and meet other students, developers, and designers to develop useful apps to make life easier using data that’s produced by the government at local, regional or national levels. We’re holding a remote version of the
The University of Aberdeen is a charity registered in Scotland, No.SC013683