The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
Clarke Ching is setting up another AgileScotland workshop in Edinburgh for the near future ‘before summer’ as he says. The theme is ‘using agile to save your job‘ and will be a mixture of ‘how to do agile’ and experience reports. I went to one of his workshops last year and found it real useful.
This is a work in progress. As I’ll be gone for a break I needed to coalesce what I could into some form of document to gather my thoughts on preparing materials for students about agile and evo. The result is this group project page. This page pulls together some of the main ideas for what
The BBC put up an article saying that the CBI and Universities UK commissioned a report surveying graduate recruiters found that 78% rated employability skills essential. The ’employability skills’ they identified were: self-management team working business and customer awareness problem solving communication and literacy application of numeracy application of information technology Each of these is
As described earlier, I want to create a viable software house experience for students as part of their group projects. Similar projects have been done in the past, and are being done in other universities. The time is right to do this in Aberdeen too. We need to recruit more students, and that can more
Saw Scott Chacon do a great talk at Scotland on Rails, which convinced me that Git would be more useful than subversion for students to use with projects. It looks a breeze on *nix or Mac, but less so on Windows. The immediate goal is to get Git installed on the department server so that
Getting ready for Scotland on Rails in Edinburgh from Thursday to Saturday. I’m giving a presentation on Friday about teaching Rails. Ran it by the person currently teaching the MSc conversion students Ruby, and he thought it fine, and mentioned that he was real pleased with how it’s been going. The students are learning lots,
Students, especially the MSc students, are always wanting to have industry related projects. One way to do this is to get industry to come to us for software projects. This will not happen overnight however. I’m sure the other universities who’ve done this also started small. Some sound impressive, and are relevance to what we might
The iphone and googlephone assualt on the rest of mobileland is having an effect. It seems that the other mobile handset OEMs are now gathering behind a proposed tool for building mobile apps based on Eclipse. It will hopefully work well and integrate some of the web features available for iphone development under Aptana, which
I put together a draft proposal for getting more student projects tied to ‘real world’ experience developing applications to the post grad teaching and learning committee, and it went down well. We’ll start small and try a pilot for the summer projects with a number of students. This will let us iron out the details
Ok, so Java is less important than setting up the macbook to use my mobile as a modem using Bluetooth. I don’t use this feature often, but now and again it is handy when you just get onto the train, and realise that the file you wanted to work on is still on the file
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