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One sure-fire way to get up an academic’s nose is to suggest that we have massive long summer holidays. There’s this misconception that we just sit around relaxing when the students aren’t here – without the normal day to day of teaching and admin, we’re just sat in the coffee room drinking pimms or something. So I thought I’d let you know what a day in the life of a junior academic looks like, during the summer “holidays”. Today I have done the following… Discussed the organisation of one of our first year modules for next year. Should we have randomly allocated tutorials? How shouldRead More →

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On Saturday I went back to Ysgol Bro Ddyfi to run my Android Programming Family Fun Day. This didn’t go quite as planned, but it was OK in the end… The way the day is set up is that the first half involves everyone getting the software installed on their own computers, and then working together to build a simple app, edit that app, and get it working on their phones. Then we’re supposed to break for lunch and after lunch everyone does their own thing. This didn’t quite go as planned last weekend – we ended up having to busk it a bit moreRead More →

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Last Friday, I went to Ysgol Bro Ddyfi as part of their transition week. In transition week the primary students who’ll be starting secondary in September come and visit the school, and do a load of taster sessions, getting a feel for what secondary stuff is like and finding their way around the school. SO about a month after I went to Mach (with Jordi and Mariona from Girona) to meet the primary teachers and talk about Scratch and Raspberry Pi blog here, we went back to talk to the kids themselves. We’re lucky that Jordi and Mariona are still visiting Aber, so three ofRead More →

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You can find a guide to creating animated gifs on linux at the bottom of this post: how to make animated gifs on linux We went on holiday last week to Llandudno. The main motivation was getting to see Bill Bailey, but we also engaged with some other cultural activities (motivated in part by persisitent drizzle). The copper mines are highly recommended, as is the Great Orme Tramway, although the views from the top were more misty and atmospheric than we’d hoped. The Mostyn Art Gallery was my favourite destination; there were several interactive displays which I will now show you through the medium ofRead More →

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I’m supervisor on a masters project, which is supported by the EU funded Access To Masters program. This is a great program, for students in the convergence area, which supports students in doing an MSc if they can find a company that’s also in the convergence area, and a project which is MSc suitable and also useful for the company. Mathew‘s project is with Openenergymonitor who are a tiny (~2 person) open source hardware/software company up north of Porthmadoc, and his project is to build an android app & some widgets that let people monitor their energy usage and generation. We drove up to meetRead More →

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Last week I went to London for the Hopper, and for the Karen Spärk Jones Lecture. The London Hopper Colloquium is an annual event for postgrad and post-doc women in computing. The Hopper is one of my favourite events in the women in computing calendar1: indeed I got involved in the whole women in computing/BCSWomen thing as a result of attending the Hopper back in 2006 (I was a postdoc then, and I won the poster prize – events are always more fun if you walk out with a prize, but I think I’d have enjoyed it anyway:-). I go back most years and haveRead More →

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A week or so back I went to check out the venue for next year’s BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium, and to have a chat with the local organisers (James Anderson and Yota Dimitriadi). It was lovely to catch up with James (Yota wasn’t able to make it) and it was also really positive to discuss things like venue, lineup, and that kind of stuff. It makes it feel so much more concrete when you can picture the space. So I thought I’d do a blog post so you, dear reader, can picture the space too. I did a post-doc once on a project joint with Reading,Read More →

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Yesterday I went to Swansea and saw Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of c++ talk. I wrote pretty much my entire PhD in c++ so it’s a topic I’m fairly close to, and the talk didn’t disappoint at all. Stroustrup was talking about c++11, the new version, and now I really want to get coding again and try out some of the new features of the language. It definitely looks simpler to use (one of the refrains of the talk was make the simple things simple) and it’s got some cool new features like lambda functions which could really simplify some of what I do. Stroustrup (right)Read More →

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The sixth BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium was held at the University of Nottingham, on the 4th April 2013. I can hardly believe that we’re already on number 6! The day featured talks from industry and from academia, a panel session on careers, a poster session of student work, a social, and of course lots of time for networking. The audience filing in at the start of the day The talks We had more talks than usual this year, as the original schedule featured a 1h keynote, but our speaker had to pull out due to family reasons. So Joolz & Gillian stepped in at short noticeRead More →

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Yesterday I arranged a tour of Aberystwyth University for a group of local schoolteachers, as part of the GOWS (Get On With Science) project. I’m a “Science Champion” (Champion, I tell you) on this project, which involves working with a cluster of schools looking at science, women in science, and transition from primary to secondary. The schools I’m working with are Ysgol Bro Ddyfi, the secondary school in Machynlleth, and that school’s feeder primaries; yesterday’s visit had Tomi from Ysgol Bro Ddyfi, Alwyn from Ysgol Gynradd Machynlleth, Llinos from Ysgol Gynradd Glantwymyn, and Sarah from Ysgol Llanbrynmair. First off, we met Jordi Freixenet from theRead More →