Industrial Experience at Leeds, Kent and Sheffield

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

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Developing World and the Mobile

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

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EVO: Measurable Value in the Classroom

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

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Fun and games with Agile

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

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Learning Ruby and Rails Resources

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

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Still problems with software development

There is a new 2009 Chaos Report from the Standish Group. It still shows the poor success rate for software projects, and that many are still challenged with budget and delivery issues. Things are not any better since the 2006 Chaos Report either. They are somewhat better than the original 1994 (or at scribd) report

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Agile+Evo and Student Perceptions

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

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Weekly written assignments for CS students

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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Mobile Workshop for School Pupils Ideas

As part of our schools recruitment plan to get more kids to come to study here in Aberdeen, and to do computer science in particular, I’ve said that ‘maybe I could do a mobile computing workshop’. Last year we did an number of workshops on Artificial Intelligence as part of a roadshow. That went down

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