SOFT6008 Class 27

More coding.

The Assignment 1 specification was locked down and the deadline set at noon on 12 April 2010.

SOFT6008 Class 26

More coding. More debugging.

If I even have to design a debugging course, I will use JavaScript as the language. There are so many banana skins to slip on.

SOFT6008 Copying code

Students should be careful about sharing code. Giving your code to another student could be considered cheating. Since it can be difficult to know what is OK and what is not, it is safer if you never swap code.


Alumnos no deben compartir individual codigos. Facilitar tu codigo a otro alumno podria ser considerado una falta. Debido a la dificultad para distinguir lo que esta permitido y no permitido la norma a seguir es no compartir tu codigo.

SOFT6008 Class 25 Extra

Since students stayed on working in the lab, I stayed too.

I won't call this Class 26 though, because that would confuse my number system. We now have an extra class in hand in case I am missing some day.

SOFT6008 Class 25

Students worked on their code and I helped with debugging.

CCAD

We talked briefly about flickr and YouTube.

Students spent a lot of time fiddling with their blogs.

I explained how podcasting worked and how to find sonline resources using the iTunes Music Store. Making podcasts is a bit complicated. Audio podcasts are easy enough, but video is more work. We had a quick look at the kinds of things iMovie could do.

I gave out an article on Podcasting.


Video of some of the class.

SOFT6007 Class 24

We moved to C128. Attendance was poor so there was no danger of running out of room.

Few students seemed interested in doing any work. So my theory about a lab being more productive than a classroom was incorrect.

From what I could gather, only one student did anything even remotely related to work for this module.

SOFT6007 Class 22 & 23 A

We did an exam

SOFT6007 Class 22 & 23

We had an in-class exam

SOFT6007 EV Week 06

We looked at how to use tables to make the layout of pages more interesting.

We moved to C128 so students who wanted to could use Photoshop. Most did in fact.

The exam will be in IT2.3 in two weeks time.

Wiki CIT

Hi Guys


The delay in the faculty programmatic review opens up the possibility of doing it in a different way. Normally the inputs into the process are very small number and not very diverse. In fact most of the inputs come from ourselves.


What if we were to open it up to the review process and make it completely public? In computing we are very good at getting input from industrial sources, but we could cast our net even further. What if very early on we invited input and discussion from any interested stake holders, be they students, industry contacts, parents, or whoever. Most of the stake holders in science and engineering are very computer literate and would be able to use any web based tools we chose to make use of.


We could attempt to start with a blank slate for how things should look and get the community of interested parties to devise out strategy and programmes for us. Of course, some publicity would be required to get people interested, but that is a good thing anyway. A lot of thought would have to go into the kind of tools we use and just how open we make ourselves, but I think it could be done. We don’t have the resources to develop new tools, but even off the shelf tools (e.g. wikis and blogs) could help us achieve something.


Perhaps there is insight out there that our current review methods cannot capture. Perhaps there are important things simply not on our radar. If we cannot hope to find them, maybe they can find us.


For starters, imagine a website where ANYONE could start the process of designing a module at CIT. Any serious proposal with enough support could be shepherded through the approval process at CIT and eventually offered. Imagine if you were to scale up that kind of thinking. Once you start to think in that way, a variety of possibilities and opportunities start to present themselves.

SOFT6008 Class 24

Students continued coding and I went around helping them out. Over complexity seems to be the common theme running through students' code.

For the credit card check digit I am expecting students to only worry about 16 digit numbers, like we have in Ireland.

SOFT6008 More Check Digit Fun

IBAN
EAN
ID Numbers from aruond the world
French numbers (en Francais)

SOFT6008 Check Digit Test Cases

Here are some data to use as test cases for the check digit exercises.

IE-PPSN

These numbers are valid in theory
5313197L
1234567T
1234567t
0000000W
0000071w

ES-DNI

These are valid numbers
03457393-X
03457393X
03457393x
03405999-K
70240341-C
70259948-P
70259948p

If these test cases give you trouble read the small print on the ParseInt box!.

I have noticed that in real life Spaniards tend to insert separators between groups of digits to make the DNI number easier to read and it is common to put a dash before the letter (as above). To accommodate this your code should strip out all useless characters from the input before looking at it more closely.

Ensure that your code insists on the correct length
007-X is not valid. But 00000000-X is.

Euro Banknotes

Just take some from your wallet. There are fewer than 26 countries that issue Euro banknotes some some letters never appear at the start of a serial number. Accounting for this would require some very inelegant code. We can't have inelegant code!

Be sure to check some serial numbers that have a zero immediately after the letter. If that gives you trouble ParseInt may be to blame.

SOFT6008 Class 23

Students continued to work on the exercises. The check digits are proving to be a real test of programming skill. There is a lot of cluttered thinking about.

Interesting Article from the Irish Times

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0304/1224265557558.html

SOFT6008 Class 22

Students carried on working on the various exercises

I advised students to write the FizzBuzz program just to get their brain muscles ready for the algorithms they are trying to code.
 FizzBuzz:
"Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”."

SOFT6008 Class 21

We lokoed at some more check digit calculations: Euro, EAN, DNI, Finnish ID

We looked some useful JavaScript functions

CCAD

I had an interesting class in CCAD with art teachers taking a masters course. When I say interesting, I mean interesting for me. It's interesting to present what it is you do to people from a different background and see how they apply to what they do.

I talked about blogs and how they work. Then I outlined how blogs could be used in education. There were lots of interesting questions from the floor. That's always good.
CCAD01.m4v

I got each student to set up a blog. We didn't make as much progress as I would have liked because the machines were acting up a tiny bit. [My guess is something to do with the proxy server]. Some students who were not confident with IT had their confidence dented even further, even though  actually they were doing great and doing everything correctly. So students will have to customise their blogs and add the blog list from home.

Towards the end I gave a short talk on blogging for artists. My challenge to practicing artists is to share the process of their art making so that we can have a better understanding of the finished product, and to contribute something to this society that has invested a lot in their education. If art and artists are going to matter, then they are going to have to speak up. Sitting in your bedroom making nice things is just therapy.
CCAD2.m4v

Notes: CCAD-blogtalk.pdf artist-blog.pdf

SOFT6007 Class 20

There was a class going on in C170 when we arrived and the participants looked like they hadn't a notion of moving. Rather than throw them out, only to discover 2 minutes later that the projector wasn't working, I moved the class to C128. There we had a PhotoShop lab and students worked away on getting to grips with the various tools.

I reminded students about the exam on Thursday next.

Of course C128 can't hold the 40+ students in the class. But attendance on Fridays is so poor that we didn't have a problem.

We might do this again from time to time since there may be weeks when labs are more use than lectures.