teaching – Page 15 – dangermouse.net

Engineering some data

It was rainy today. I planned to take Scully to the dog park in the afternoon, but I know she doesn’t enjoy it when it’s cold and wet. If the temperature had been a bit warmer, I would still have taken her, but I don’t want her shivering in the cold.

I did another run this morning, 2.5k. I figure if I can try to do at least that much every weekday, then that’s probably a good start to getting some exercise and fitness.

The main thing I did today was work on the curriculum outlining for the university data engineering course that will be held in first semester of 2022. We’re at the stage of breaking each week’s lecture down into individual slides related to the subtopics within that week. The lecturer and I have taken about half the weeks each to break down like this, so I have about 4 or 5 to do. I completed two of them today, and wrote a brief note on one of the other.

For dinner I made a special treat: pasta with tomato sauce and burrata.

I actually split the burrata in two and shared it with my wife. Very decadent!

New content today:

Students, not comics

I planned today to work on a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! writing, since I don’t even have a new strip ready for Monday at this point. I ended up doing very little of that, because I had two ethics classes, plus spent a few hours helping university students with their image processing assignments for the final course assessment tasks.

I also went on a long walk with my wife and Scully, taking one of our usual long routes – a loop along streets and through parks, and then back along the shore of the harbour. I did a couple of bird counting lists using eBird, and on the second half of the walk I got up to 15 different species, which is a good high number – more than usual.

A couple of photos, from Friday, when walking Scully at the dog park I spotted this Australian brushturkey:

And yesterday near the pie shop where I got lunch is this extremely modest fish and chip shop:

I’ve never eaten there, so I can’t attest to whether the claim is true or not. Although I’ve seen some reviews which definitely imply that the claim is overblown.

New content today:

And a busy Friday to finish the week

Today I had to deal with questions from university students that I didn’t have time to handle last night. They stretched my knowledge a bit so it took a lot of time to handle them. I’d wanted to dedicate the day to writing comics and other such activities, but I only got a little of that done.

The other thing about today is that it was very hot. 33°C in the city, up to 34°C in some suburbs. It was the first real blast of heat as summer closes in. And windy – the sort of day with a strong hot wind blowing trees and leaves and pollen all over the place. That made it rather unpleasant being outside.

Tonight my wife is having a night out with her friends. I am looking after Scully, so I took her up the street to a burger place where we could sit outside while I ate. And while waiting for my food, my wife walked past with one of her friends! So Scully became super excited, because she loves that friend (having stayed with her for a couple of weeks while my wife and I were travelling). And then when I came home, Scully didn’t want to come with me – she wanted to go back to the restaurant where my wife always goes with her friends!

New content today:

Very quick Thursday update

I’ve been super busy this evening.

My day got off to a terrible start when 2 minutes before an online ethics class my Internet went out. I used 4G on my iPad to post an apology and that I had to cancel the class. I wasn’t set up to run Zoom on 4G, and I don’t know how long it would have taken me to download the client and get everything running. This was the class I had to cancel last week as well due to the ISO meeting I was in at the time, so the 4 students in this timeslot have now missed out 2 weeks in a row. It’s the first time since I started that I’ve had Internet issues during a class.

The outage was a scheduled maintenance window, as I discovered by looking it up. It could have occurred at any time between 7am and 3pm, though of course it happened right before my lesson was due to begin at 10am. After the net came back on half an hour later, I contacted the students to offer a make-up class at the same time tomorrow. Three of the four said they could make it, so I’ll be doing it then.

I mostly worked on Darths & Droids writing today. I’m very short on buffer and need to get more strips written for the next week.

This evening I had two more ethics classes, and in between I made sourdough and cooked dinner, and dealt with some student feedback on the image processing assessment task that I marked last week. That was quite a job, which I won’t go into further here. Let me just say that I thought I got off lightly during Monday’s tutorial session, when most of the students logged out after about an hour, so I didn’t have much to do for the next 2 hours – but now I’ve definitely earned my pay from the university this week. I also have a couple of outstanding requests for assistance in coding up some of the project work for the next assessment task, from two different teams.. I didn’t have time to get to that tonight, so will have to do it tomorrow morning as well.

New content today:

A long haul day

It was a busy day today. After the last week of ISO meetings and having deadlines for other things, I had two things I needed to get done today.

Firstly I started by making some Irregular Webcomic! strips, since without new ones the buffer would have run out today. I didn’t have time to write and photograph my usual batch of over 20 strips in one go, so I had to just write three strips to last until the end of this week, photograph them, assemble them, and write annotations for them. Fortunately I didn’t suffer any writers block and managed to get the whole lot done within a couple of hours. But that will only last until the weekend, and I’ll need to get another batch going in time for Monday.

After picking up Scully from my wife’s work at lunchtime, I brought her home via the slopey park again, where we did some ball fetching and lying in the grass for a bit. She was very good for me this afternoon when we finally got home, just sleeping in her dog bed until my wife arrived home from work.

This gave me time to work on the next thing – my ethics lesson for the new week of classes this evening. This week we’re talking about enhancing sports performance, in particular the ethics of performance enhancing drugs. We get there via a route starting with high altitude training – in which athletes live in mountains for several weeks while training, to increase their red blood cell count, which gives them an advantage when they return to lower altitudes. It’s a common (and legal) method that athletes have been using for many years. Then we go to low-oxygen tents, which simulate altitude training by let the athlete sleep in a low oxygen environment – it’s cheaper and easier and produces the same effect: higher red blood cell count. And it’s also legal in sports training.

Then we go onto blood doping – removing blood from an athlete, then a few weeks later transfusing the red cells back into the same athlete. This produces the same effect—increased blood cell count—just without the low-oxygen training. The result is exactly the same, but I ask the kids if it’s still acceptable.

And then we hit erythropoietin, or EPO. An artificial copy of a protein secreted by human kidneys, that regulates red blood cell production. If you inject it, you end up with more red blood cells. Again, the same result as altitude training, but by a different method. And the kids need to decide if this is okay or not. All the way along this path they need to justify their answers with explanations.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow, where I don’t have any hard deadlines for things I need to get done. I might even relax a little…

New content today:

Back to the office!

My wife that is, not me. Her office is opening up again after the long COVID lockdown here in Sydney, and she went in to work this morning for a full day (she did a single afternoon last week in preparation). And she took Scully back into the office for the first time in months. So I had the entire morning to myself!

I had the last class of the week on the ethics topic of Democracy. It was a bit tough because three of the students in this class are a bit slow to collect their thoughts and express them, while one of the kids is a fast thinker, so he gets a bit impatient. Fortunately though, the USA goes off daylight saving in a couple of weeks, which will split this class into two, with the US students moving an hour later, while the ones in Asia stay at the same time.

At lunch time I went to my wife’s office (a short walk away, which is good because she doesn’t need to use public transport while COVID is still going around) to pick up Scully and take her home for the afternoon. Scully likes being in the office with my wife, but she gets a bit stir crazy being in there all day, so I took her for a long walk before heading home.

We walked past Naremburn, a suburb about 2.5 km away that I walk to sometimes. There used to be a small bakery here, which made some okay meat pies and some good sweet treats, but it closed down maybe a year or so ago, leaving nothing much of interest in the small cluster of shops for me. (There’s a couple of cafes, but I don’t drink coffee. There’s a brewpub, but it’s not exactly the sort of place you can grab a bite to eat while walking home – though it is nice to sit in for a long lunch. And there’s a hairdresser and a dog groomer and a clothing shop.) Well, I was pleasantly surprised to discover today that a brand new bakery has opened in the same place as the old bakery! I peeked through the door and it looks like they have some nice things, so maybe later this week I’ll walk over here again before I eat lunch and I’ll have the chance to try some things.

This afternoon I tried to write some comics, but had a bad case of writer’s block, so didn’t get much done. And tonight was the second last tutorial session for the UTS image processing course. I had to help a few groups of students with their project work – several of them are discovering that the grand ambitions they had with their project specification reports are not so easy to turn into practice. I reassured them that the important thing was to adapt and learn, and report on the fact that they had to try something else because their initial plans didn’t work out. I think all the students I’m working with are pretty competent and doing decent work, so I hope that’s reflected in their final reports.

New content today:

Super busy week: Saturday

Today was the final day of the ISO Photography standards meeting, so I had to be up and ready to start by 7am again. The last day is easier as it’s administrative stuff and usually not technical discussion. In other business I suggested that we should establish formal liaison relationship with the W3C consortium, since they are doing work on defining a HTML canvas for display of HDR images, which is potentially overlaps with work we are doing on defining a format for HDR and wide colour gamut still images. We don’t want to be duplicating work, or worse, coming up with competing standards.

Once the meeting was over, I had to prepare for the 5th lesson of my course on Creative Thinking and game design. Because of student schedule changes it’s moved form Sunday to Saturday fo the final two weeks. I printed and cut out the Ruin the Wedding game, and played it a couple of times with my wife.

We discovered that it was far too easy to ruin the wedding, sending the bride home in disgust both times before most people even made it to the reception. There were also flavour issues with events written on the card that should really only happen at either the ceremony or the reception being playable when people were pretty much anywhere. So we brainstormed ways to fix these issues and the kids came up with some ideas that should work. I’ll make a new version of the game and we’ll do another round of playtesting and refining next week – and that’ll be the course done!

New content today:

Super busy week: Monday

Dawn broke on what is going to be a very busy week for me. First up today was teaching the last class of the “Disgust” topic in my online ethics classes. After that I took Scully out for a walk, and dropped by the post office to pick up some prepaid envelopes and stamps for my wife to use for sending orders of her dog bandanas out. I stopped off on the way back to grab some sushi rolls for lunch.

Back home I had to hustle to put together the rules and game pieces for the board game that the kids and I had designed together in the Creative Thinking class that I taught last night. The class ended with a rough outline of how the game works, which I had to whip into a playable shape, document, and then create a board and a bunch of game components that the kids can print out and playtest before next Sunday’s class. I mentioned before that the theme we’d come up with was ruining someone’s wedding. Here’s the first draft of the game board:

The idea is that the bride, groom, and various other people all have to move around following the blue arrows – hopefully to end on “happily ever after”. At least that’s their goal. The goal of the players in the game is to make the people upset, ruin the wedding, and make as many people as possible go home in disgust. Each turn, one wedding participant moves along a blue arrow, while the players try to do things to upset them or delay them (using a hand of cards). I came up with a clever way to encapsulate the idea that “a bride is never late to her wedding” – as you can see on the board, she can’t arrive at the ceremony until everyone else is either there, or running late. If she arrives and some guests are still late, then they miss the ceremony (and get upset and go home). And nobody can leave the ceremony to head to the reception until after the bride arrives and the ceremony happens.

There’s a bit more to it than that, but you get the general idea. After we do a few iterations and refine the gameplay, I’ll share the final result.

I had to get the game draft ready and uploaded to my class before 6pm, as this evening I had a tutorial session, helping university students with their image processing projects in the course I’m tutoring. That just finished.

The rest of the week is going to be even busier, as I have an online meeting for ISO Photography standards from 7-11am, every day from Tuesday to Saturday. So my mornings are accounted for. Tomorrow afternoon I need to prepare a science lesson for a kid that evening, and Wednesday I need to prepare my ethics class for the next week (on Democracy). And somehow I need to make another week’s worth of comics for my webcomic sites during this week too. Oh, and I also have to squeeze in time to mark the first project assignment for the university image processing course, which was submitted last Friday. It’s going to be exhausting, and I’m going to need the weekend to recover. Or possibly catch up…

New content today:

Game design theme decided!

Tonight I ran the third lesson of my 6-week course in Creative Thinking and Game Design. If you recall last week we had some intriguing suggested themes for the game that we’re working on. I’m happy to say that after going through and rating all of the theme ideas, we came up with three ideas that we all agreed were good for a game:

Visiting different countries
Causing trouble in school
Ruining someone’s wedding

And by consensus we agreed that the one we liked best was the last one: ruining someone’s wedding. So that’s what we’re now officially doing – designing a board game about ruining a wedding! We also came up with the goal of the game – how you win: By making as many people as possible upset. And we listed some tentative game mechanics – we might use a board to represent the wedding venue (although I’m not convinced we need to do this); and we might have cards with various objects that will make people upset, for example an embarrassing photo of the bride. (We’ll keep it clean and G-rated! So let’s say no more about that.)

The kids have homework to play with mechanics and come up with any new ideas during the week. Next lesson we’ll put them together into a game that we can start playing!

Other than that, today I worked on the current batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, assembling them from the photos I took a couple of weeks ago. I’ve now completed that batch, so I can start thinking about writing the next batch…. it never ends.

I also did some baking today. I made sourdough bread, and because my wife is keen on fruit and nut loaf I made one of those, with dried apricots and walnut chunks in it. And I made some chocolate chip cookies, which I’ve been craving for weeks. I finally got around to buying some choc chips in the last grocery shop, so today I made a batch. I dotted two baking trays with dough and put them in the oven, heated to 180°C, and set the oven timer for a couple of minutes less than the minimum baking time specified in the recipe.

When the timer went off, I opened the oven to check the cookies… and black smoke poured out! I didn’t know what had happened until I noticed the oven mode selector knob wasn’t pointing at “Bake”, but rather at the adjacent setting, “Pizza”. I know I set it to “Bake” and the temperature to 180°C, but I must have bumped the knob when putting the baking trays in or something, and when the knob is turned to “Pizza” it also automatically resets the temperature to 220°C! The “Pizza” setting also applies base heat, to crisp the bottom of the pizza dough and uses the fan to force hot air throughout the oven. So the cookies were WAY overdone.

The ones on the bottom baking tray were basically charcoal on the lower half, and unsalvageable. The upper baking tray fared a little better – they are a bit well done, but just edible. I normally like them a bit gooey in the middle, but these are baked hard through.

It hasn’t been a good week for me in the kitchen.

New content today:

Another busy Saturday

The main thing I did today was work on completing the lesson plan and slides for tomorrow’s third lesson in my Creative Thinking & Problem Solving course on Outschool. There was less prep work needed for this one, but it will be more on-the-fly discussion with the kids about the various game theme and mechanics ideas that we’re working on, mixed with some thinking techniques to help settle on a single theme and then choose a few appropriate mechanics. I hope it goes well in practice!

I also did some housework, cleaning various rooms and finally going through the pile of old paperwork on my desk to sort out what needs filing and what could be thrown away. There’s still a bit of clutter around. I really think at some point I need to declare a week off doing other things and just spend it doing a proper spring clean and getting the whole house in order again. I’ve got three new books that I have no room for on my bookshelves, until I rearrange things and potentially get rid of some old stuff I don’t want any more. The pains of living in a small place.

For dinner I tried the eggplant and haloumi tarts that I tried unsuccessfully a few days ago. I didn’t burn the eggplant this time, but it reduced in volume quite a bit, and I ended up with less filling than I expected. So they ended up with a higher crust/filling ratio, but tasted good. Next time I might try adding some more filling ingredients.

New content today: