Robot Feet, Part 2
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Recently, I was told by a senior academic that I should ensure that only about 25% to 30% of the students in my class should be awarded a grade of A
, that 40% to 50% are awarded a B
, and that the remainder should be C
and below. This started me wondering: what is the right proportion per grade? And, once we decide that, how does a teacher achieve it?
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I’ve been trying to write each weekday morning this year. Things started off well, but now I’m finding it hard to find the time to write and even harder to find the topics to write about.
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This semester, I’ve been taking the Capstone I students at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) through their paces.
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Cancel culture is getting many headlines recently, so I thought I’d add my two cents worth to the discussion.
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I started with this recipe, but wanted to use fresh green leafy vegetables instead of the dried ones. I also wanted to give it a bit more bite, so I added some fresh green chiles.
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I was struck by the similar topic areas in two different and disparate podcasts that I listen to.
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The Data Structures course I’m teaching this semester is using both Java and C++ as the language of instruction. The students have more experience in Java than in C++.
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One of my recent programming assignments in my Data Structures course included these instructions for an assignment.
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Facebook recently shut down posts by Australian “news” organizations on its platform.
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Cloud services make creating new, scalable applications very easy, at a cost.
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COVID-19 is still running rampant through the United States, at higher levels than in the initial peak. So why am I OK with going back to in-person teaching?
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Coding style is a matter of taste.
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Correlation is not causation.
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An administrator of a large organization that I do some work for recently sent an email trying to find someone who’d made an inappropriate purchase. The email was CC-ed to over 190 people. So I thought I’d write today about some simple things that you can do with respect to email.
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During my Data Structures class we are soon to look at the FIFO: a queue. So I thought it might be fun to look at some queuing theory, not the data structures but how queues are modeled.
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Donald Knuth, is a professor emeritus at Stanford University in Computer Science. In text, he wrote one of the most influential series of books called The Art of Computer Programming. While he was writing those books, he discovered typography and text layout and wrote TeX, the “word processing” system that many computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers use for their writings — though I, like many others, use a simplified version of it called LaTeX.
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My previous post What I like in a job came to the conclusion that I like working remotely, I like working with people, and I like building stuff. Having given it a little more thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that What I like in a job is the wrong way to phrase it. It should be What I like in my professional life.
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Today, February 2nd is Groundhog Day. Today, Punxsutawney Phil came out and saw his shadow, meaning that there will be another six weeks of snow.
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In my professional career, I’ve had many different jobs. I’ve worked as a lecturer (professor) in several different universities (ANU, UQ, UNewHaven, CCSU, Fairfield) in two different countries (Australian and the United States). I’ve worked in one large multinational corporation (UTC), as well as several start-ups (Mitec, MVT, emuse, Noster). In the non-profit space, I’ve been, until recently, an active volunteer with the IEEE. I’ve held the position of Secretary of three different geographical Sections: ACT, Queensland, and Connecticut. I’ve even held the position of Chair of the Connecticut IEEE Section.
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Capstone projects are a project that senior students (final year students) take on to showcase the skills they’ve learnt in their degree. Sometimes this is called Senior Design Project.
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Them: "It doesn't work!"
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Yesterday, I had my first class (times three sections) of the data structures course I’m teaching this semester at Fairfield. The class didn’t talk much about data structures, as it was mostly background and process related things. I like to spend some in-class time (“synchronous” time) going through part of the class syllabus, so that the students at least see it once.
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Today, January 26th, is Australia day.
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There is always a tension in academia, particularly in computer science, between teaching the theory and teaching the practice. Theoretical computer science is largely mathematical; practical computer science… isn’t.
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Today is Martin Luther King, Jr Day in the United States. One of the legal people I follow on Twitter, Akiva Cohen, posted a long Twitter thread quoting from Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Akiva admonished his followers to read it in full.
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[a^2 = b^2 + c^2]
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Yesterday’s post was about how my teaching has changed since the pandemic hit. One big thing that I’ve left out of it is my approach to midterm and final exams.
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Today is January 13th, which makes it ten months since that Friday the 13th in March, 2020 when all the West Hartford Public Schools went online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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These are some notes about exploring more advanced programming for those who have started programming and looking for more to explore. They assume that you’ve already learnt a programming language, have written one or two of your own programs and are wanting to know what to do next. This list is not ordered. Feel free to ignore any and all of it. It’s aimed to be a “recipe” book for what to do next i in programming.
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Take A Number seemed to work pretty well in the lab on Saturday, the first time I’ve used it where I think it needs to be used.
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Last night, I went to the #InsurTechHfd meeting last night (March 14, 2019) at the Upward site at 20 Church Street, downtown Hartford.
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From the “First Cut” part of this series, there were several things that were let undone that I felt needed to be addressed.
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As I said in the last post of this series, I thought it’d be a good start to kicking the tires to run some performance tests using JMeter.
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My first cut at Take A Number is now “complete” : as far as I can tell, it does what I wanted it to do. This post runs through some of the implementation details, and checks to see what else might need to happen to make this workable.
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After taking a stab at the design classes, the next step was to start up a project. As I said earlier, I’ve decided to develop this in Python using the PyCharm CE development environment.
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Now that I understand the problem and have selected the technology I’m going to use to implement the take a number system, I need to move from my analysis classes:
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After publishing Take A Number: User Experience, I received a critique from Vick Lane who is an experienced UX professional in Australia at Square V Design.
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This is part of the continuing story of Take A Number. The previous episodes are:
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Now that we’ve decided on the high level architecture for Take A Number, we need to think about how the users will use it.
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So we’ve explored the requirements a little, now we have to decide how to do this.
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During the lab classes I teach, I find it hard to give my attention equally to all student groups.
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Apart from simple application to the tasks at hand, one of the prime problems I see in teaching students is their preconceived ideas about how things should be. This means, before they get to learn, they have to unlearn their previous ways of thinking.
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