Education
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20% of the Time, 80% of the Value
→: 20% of the Time, 80% of the ValueIf 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…
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Delegating
→: DelegatingAs 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…
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Thinking Like a Programmer
→: Thinking Like a ProgrammerI 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…
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An Introduction to Processing
→: An Introduction to ProcessingFind 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.
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Explaining Pass by Reference and Pass by Value
→: Explaining Pass by Reference and Pass by ValueYesterday 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…
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Missed Opportunity
→: Missed OpportunityI’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…
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Java Workshop in Wave
→: Java Workshop in WaveTonight, 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…
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Women in Engineering Task Force Report
→: Women in Engineering Task Force ReportThis 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…
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Java: Building Blocks
→: Java: Building BlocksTomorrow 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…