Frinds of me on facebook will undoubtedly have noticed that I have been working on a Mac computer for some time. (I have had quite a few outcries/rants/trolling outbursts of that particular platform’s lack of user-friendliness.)

One of the things I have been working on is an iOS version of my Rune Escape game. Proudly I can announce that it is now a reality on the App Store. Apple approved it sometime this night, and you can now download it here.

I am taking a few (well-deserved) days off, so it seems that it is my last day in the office this year!

Therefore it is a natural time for reflection, especially as my computer is busy transcoding videos for my Java course.

This year has been a very fast year for me. I have heard that the older we get the faster they become, and I suppose that it is only natural, given the total sum of experience grows while the experience of a year approximate to a constant. However if this year is a gauge for the future, it does not bode well. Don’t get me wrong, I have loved every minute (hmn, perhaps not the marking over the summer) of my working life, and it has been an extremely interesting year. Why is that? Well here are some reasons:

• I started in the new position as Lecturer in January. The transition was relatively easy, I have after all worked here some years, but in addition to my normal work this means that on top of the teaching and research I do at the University, I also am working on improving the undergraduate international student intake. This is a very difficult area to work in these days. Our government is not exactly making this easier with changes to visa and other obstacles to prospective students. I have been asked to look at this in news ways and do stuff that is different from what has been done up until now! I love that, and it is giving me a lot of scope to develop my own ideas within this area.
• In the beginning of the year our VC made the decision that UoR should join FutureLearn.com. At first this should not really impact my life. But due to luck and well-connectedness my was approached and asked if I wanted to create a course based on my Android tutorial found here on my blog. I in turn had a better idea. I thought why not change that to create a beginners course in programming where the students would end up having created a simple Android game. The idea was well received, and suddenly I found myself being extremely busy – the course was indeed selected as the 4th course to ever run on the FutureLearn platform. Between you and me – I had hoped it would run sometime further out in the future. But this was my opportunity, and the summer was spent developing the course from scratch – together with my good colleagues Shirley Williams, Tharindu Liyanagunawardena and Luke Micallef. We had fun doing this, and we have learned a lot from the experience, oh, and it means that I can take a few days off here around Christmas 😉
• Before all of this I had decided to “Flip” my Java course. I.e. substitute lectures with videos and put more emphasis on practicals. I also made all of the videos for the Autumn term in the summer, and I have just finished the Spring term’s videos (with a cold – those videos have a lot of coughing and funny sounds).
• We ran the FutureLearn course over 7 weeks in the Autumn. I was certainly not alone in this. Tharindu was a great help. She was full time on this, and really good at pointing me to “difficult” cases and problems. (I was designated to the unusual problems, and what can best be described as difficult situations). We had also employed 7 of our students. They were fantastic! If they ever need a reference, I will give them really good ones. Shirley was also supporting the course directly. Professors could probably have been staying away from direct contact I suppose, but I think this was way too fun for her to keep away from. We learn a lot through out the course, but especially in the first week. We knew it would be a difficult week for the participants. The team was great in tackling problems, and I believe we know pretty much all the problems developers can run into when installing the Android development tools. We have just had a meeting about the first week, and what should be changed in the content, and I think we will have an improved course, even though we also know it will be impossible to make all participants happy…
• The FutureLearn course has given me opportunities to be interview in the press. I have been on BBC South News, ITV Meridian News. I was interviewed by Tony Blackburn on BBC Berkshire. I was in Professional Engineering, and several news paper articles.
• I have also travelled. 10 days to India to recruit students. It was a great experience with a lot of excellent Indian food! I did get to connect to a lot of interesting people over there, and I really hope that I’ll meet some of them in the UK!
• Before getting my new position I still had to find funding to sustain my old position. Luckily I had managed to do that through the EU funded I-TUTOR project. However we could not find any one to take over this position. It is rather difficult to find someone with experience in eLearning research who also knows about AI and data mining.  So on top of becoming the Principal Investigator  I had to do all the coding on top of my new position. This meant evening and Sunday work. I am happy that the project has reached all its targets. It has been a fruitful collaboration and really interesting. I hope I somehow will be able to continue in EU funded projects, although travelling to Bari, Italy, just before going to India is not a thing I will miss in the future.
• I have also been engaged in an internally funded project, where we create mobile apps to register biodiversity on the University campus. I work on this with colleagues from Agriculture, Biology and Geography.
• I was in a team that won the University Award for outstanding contributions to teaching and learning.
• General teaching has been great fun as usual. I still enjoy teaching my courses – Java, Human Computer Interfacing and Evolutionary Computing.

My on-the-side consultancy has had limited access to my concentration! I have created a new version of the AWR app with integrated play facilities (it is a radio that pays the bill, so seems rather important), and I have only developed one new game. Path of Dragons. It is a really fun game, which ought to be further developed. I have coded up AI players, I just need to test them properly. I hope to do that soon, even if I have said that all of the Summer and Autumn. I have invested in a Mac development stack, and it would also be really good to get some apps finished on that platform!

With this, I think it is time to turn off the screens here at UoR. I hope next year will be just as interesting, if not with a little more time to breath 🙂

Merry Christmas!

One of my responsibilities at the University of Reading is to connect with potential international undergraduate students for the School of Systems Engineering. This year we’ll try a direct approach where I travel to India with a representative from the University’s International Office. In the period 21/11 – 01/12 we’ll be travelling to Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi. Here we’ll meet up with agents and students alike. If you are in India, and would like to meet and talk to me about the University and our engineering and computer science degrees then you have the opportunity to go to one of the British Council’s Educational Fairs. Mail me to get details of when and where.

In 1998 I bought Grand Prix Legends

I’ve played it ever since. Today I won the Nüremberg 1967 race! Proudly I can proclaim that I have now won all races available as standard in the game. An achievement not shared by many!

Had I done it in real cars, I would have died about a 1000 times, and I pay homage to the (stupid) men who raced these things for real. Many of them with lethal endings…

I have just finished 5 weeks of teaching C++ to the first year students at University of Reading. My impression is that my personal effort went well, for instance the students actually clapped when I finished my last lecture today – something that came as a complete surprise to me! Although a very nice surprise…

Having said that I believe that C/C++ isn’t the right language choice to teach programming to novice programmers. In a session a few weeks ago, where I gave feedback to them in the form of an interactive “Post-it coloured stickers show me what you think” session, it was brought to my attention that more “basic” programming construct such as pointers and arrays were still a struggle. I actually had to create a fast re-cap session on pointers to somehow hammer this concept into them. The questions I started to get were much more satisfying after this session. The problem is that what is the chance of learning function overloading, method de-referencing or multiple inheritance, if you don’t get how the arrays and pointers interact in the examples you see, as a struggling student, within the lecture notes? You probably go blind by these concepts before you even start thinking about inheritance at all!

Don’t get me wrong. Object Orientation is a crucial concept for aspiring Computer Scientists and programmers to understand, but the combination of C and then OOP in the form of C++ does not help teaching this. I believe that taking a OOP language such as Python, Java, C# or even VB would enable a much cleaner learning path into OOP whilst showing the concepts of programming. Once you understand these within the framework of OOP, you don’t really need to be taught imperative programming, because you would understand it quite easily!

Unfortunately I am not the person deciding this. I have voiced my opinion appropriately many times. I have had an interesting time teaching C++, wouldn’t mind doing it again, as most students clearly have moved far on the learning curve of programming – I just think it could be done more effectively…