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In: Computing at School, Geekiness, teaching, Wales
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Yesterday was 5/12/13 – numbers which make up a Pythagorean triple – the sides of a right-angled triangle. A guy called Marco Matosic spotted this quirk of the date system and decided to put on an event at the Ceredigion museum, involving various people from around aber. During the day about 150 pupils from local schools came through to stroll around the exhibits and learn a bit about Pythagoras. I was there helping to run the computer installation, with Anne Marggraf-Turley from Coleg Ceredigion and Amanda Clare from aber uni (like me). Amanda and I setting up before the day began Our activity was basedRead More →

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In: BCS, Geekiness
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On Friday, we had a BCS Mid Wales show and tell. These are informal evening events where people who have cool projects come along and talk about them, and the BCS pays for free beer and pizza. They’re good fun, we’ve had about 5 of them now, and it doesn’t seem like we’re running out of projects. Indeed there are loads of cool things going on in and around Aberystwyth involving technology, coding, robots, and other stuff. The format of the evening is a set of short (5 minute) talks, then a break for pizza and walking around to look at stuff, then another setRead More →

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In: careers, teaching
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In the last four weeks I’ve been to Gregynog Hall 3 times. Luckily for me it’s a beautiful place – a stately home in the middle of Powys, with superb gardens, and really nice cake. The first visit was with our first year students, who we take there every year for a team building weekend. The second visit was with our second year students who’re going out on industrial year. And the final visit was Monday and Tuesday of this week for a staff awayday. Here’s a picture of dawn mist over the fields in the grounds: I think it’s great that we take theRead More →

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This summer, Amanda Clare and I won a small grant for teaching development. The idea was to use the stuff I teach (HTML5, JavaScript) to help students learn the stuff Amanda teaches (Mathematical concepts for computer scientists). We won just under £2k from the Aberystwyth University Learning and Teaching Enhancement fund, and we spent most of it on employing Mike Sheldon, a recent Aberystywth PhD graduate. I can thoroughly recommend working with Mike – he’s not only a good coder but he’s really quick at understanding problems, and imaginative at coming up with solutions. If we manage to get funding to extend the site, I’dRead More →