The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
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
I did an intro to test driven development (TDD) talk for TechMeetup Aberdeen last night and started with the ‘simple TDD game‘. I modified the game based on comments there, and made a few changes of my own. I used 2×4 Lego bricks as ‘rulers’ to be the ‘testing tool’ as this was easier than
The agile classroom in the university should be a cohesive concept that forms a thread through the student’s degree. As the student learns more in the classroom through a mixture of lessons and exercises, there should also be opportunities to use this knowledge in the wider community of the university and its local community. After
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,
As part of the MSc summer projects preparation I ran a number of workshops and lectures on agile, evo and kanban related topics. These all went well. Some of them were being run for the second time (agile with Lego and the Evo workshop), so they went smoother, while the kanban game was new. I
I found the solution to pricing agile projects. It has been staring me in the face for ages. You see it mentioned by lots of people: Anderson, Gilb, Cohn, Poppendieck, etc. It’s obvious really when you think about it. However, it took Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver and James Trott to spell out the answer in
I was meeting with some local developers the other night and one of the topics that came up was how to move from traditional fixed price projects to agile ones. The developer I was chatting with works for a firm that submits tenders to projects, where the clients all expect, and want fixed prices for
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
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
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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