Yesterday Sacha Chua put up a blogpost entitled "What can I help you learn? Looking for mentees". I'd been following her blog for a while now, and got out of the lurking stage and started commenting periodically, so of course I was like, "me me me!". If you don't read Sacha's blog, go and grab the ...
If you look, you'll see the Pareto Principle everywhere. Last week, I saw it in grad school. I was having my 20% - and it was awesome! But it does make me sad about the 80% of my time - this is the time that I spend marking, doing assignments that seem pointless and reading ...
As a student, you don't really learn how to delegate. It's one of those crucial life skills that doesn't seem to make it onto the curriculum, and when we think about it - how would it? There are opportunities, but you have to go out and find them. Volunteer to team lead on a group project. ...
I see this problem continually in the first years I TA - they're so overwhelmed by syntax they don't know how to start to write the program. VB (in Excel) is especially mean about this, as if a line of code won't compile it won't let you go to the next one. So, having given the ...
Find the slides for this below. If you're interested, there will be a session tonight in Wave at 7pm, but there will be another one later this week as well. As ever - feedback welcome! An Introduction to Processing View more presentations from Cate Huston.
Yesterday I had to teach the distinction between pass-by-reference and pass-by-value to my first year non-CS students. There are second and third year CS students that don't grasp this concept. But there you go. And so I explained it, to a sea of blank faces. They understood what I was saying (I think) but it made ...
I'm spending a lot more time teaching other people to code than I am actually coding at the moment. Whilst I like teaching, this is not at all in line with how I want to be spending my time. I TA a mandatory computer course in the management school, and I have a friend taking another mandatory ...
Tonight, I ran my first workshop in Wave. It was nice to have a space to discuss things, and unlike in a chat client it's easy to indicate what you're replying to. What I did was create a slide deck and make it available the day before. Then on the day, I was available to ...
This was discussed at the WECS meeting this week, there's a new attention to it as the number of women enrolled in undergraduate programs from a high of 20% to 17%. See the full report here. Recommendations are as follows: Raise the profile and improve the image of the profession. Explore how engineering curriculum and its delivery ...
Tomorrow I'm running an introduction to Java via Wave. Because I've had a degree of interest from non-complete beginners in learning Processing, I've split the content so that one session will be Java: Building Blocks which will teach the very basics of Java but does not introduce Processing, and the other session will be An ...
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