Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008
Next term, I'm teaching a Computer Science course at the University of Toronto in which graduate and undergraduate students will do some consulting and/or development work for real-world clients. The students have backgrounds in areas as diverse as network security, user interface design, machine learning, graph theory, and numerical analysis, ...
Posted in Teaching | 1 Comment »
Thursday, September 18th, 2008
...it must be (almost) real: our introduction to Computer Science using Python is now listed on Amazon. Yay!
Posted in Teaching | 6 Comments »
Thursday, September 18th, 2008
Ward Cunningham coined the phrase "technical debt" to describe the situation where poor design and/or implementation results in developers paying "interest" in the form of extra maintenance or other work that doesn't add value for users. Inspired by that, I've started asking my students to think about the "risk budget" ...
Posted in Teaching | 6 Comments »
Monday, September 8th, 2008
It's September, so here we go again... Samira, Jeremy, Carolyn, and I welcomed Aran Donohue, Alicia Grubb, Zachary Kincaid, Jason Montojo, and Rory Tulk to the team today. It'll be March or April before they've got research topics, but I'll add links to their blogs when I get them. David ...
Posted in Teaching | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
I finally got a summary of graduate students feedback on the consulting course I ran this past winter. It was pretty good overall---on a scale of 1-5, the responses were:
How much background is required to successfully complete this course?
None
Lots
2.6
How easy was it to obtain details/background needed to supplement the ...
Posted in Teaching | No Comments »
Thursday, August 7th, 2008
I had the pleasure yesterday of finally meeting Michael Feathers, author of one of my favorite programming books, and a contributor to Beautiful Code. Along with a couple of other people, we talked for a bit about unwritten books, software design, and the fact that discussion about the latter ...
Posted in Teaching | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
Here's a story for you:
http://compsci.ca/blog/lanschool-threatens-compscica-with-legal-actions/
Tony and Dan created compsci.ca as a web-based community for high school and university kids interested in computer science. [Full disclosure: Dan is doing a Google Summer of Code project under my supervision.] A couple of years ago, Dan found a flaw in LanSchool's classroom management ...
Posted in Teaching | 2 Comments »
Friday, August 1st, 2008
After years of declining or flat enrolments in Computer Science, we have some good news this year: our first-year numbers this fall are going to be up over last year's by about 20%.
Posted in Teaching | 1 Comment »
Friday, July 25th, 2008
Jennifer, Paul, Jason, and I have been working on a introductory Computer Science textbook using Python. We're in the last lap, but still haven't chosen a name, so I'd like to ask for suggestions. Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science is taken, as are Computer Science: The Python Programming ...
Posted in Teaching | 38 Comments »
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
This post from John Cook, summarizing this post from Thomas Guest, is a pretty good description of what our students have spent the summer finding out...
Posted in Student Projects, Teaching | 1 Comment »