teaching – Page 16 – dangermouse.net

My days are full of teaching stuff

I’d completed my lesson notes for the new week of online ethics classes yesterday, so I had today free to work on … other teaching notes!

I spent time doing the next level of detail in outlining the university Data Engineering course that I’ve been tasked with helping to sort out for early next year. I did a week-by-week lesson plan, indicating what should be taught during a lecture component and a practical lab/tutorial component for each week. Each week contains a few bullet points of material, including the course assessment tasks where appropriate. I started work on organising material from the previously existing course into the weekly components, and editing some of the old introductory material to fit the new course structure, but I realised I should get the lecturer to take a look at it first and sign off before I get stuck in too much further, lest it need any changes. So I’ve left that there for today, but it was a good solid chunk of work.

This evening I had the first three lessons on the new ethics topic of buying and selling. I start by asking them to think about what makes things valuable, and tell me their thoughts. I’m getting an interesting cross section of ideas so far, with qualities like rarity, age, sentimental value, usefulness, investment of labour time, and production costs all coming into it. Some kids even said nothing really has value other than people agreeing that it does – which is either insightful or they’ve heard that somewhere before.

Then I’m telling them the story of De Beers and their global monopoly on the supply of diamonds and how they artificially created the idea that diamonds are incredibly valuable. And I ask a bunch of questions around the ethics of them doing that. A few kids were shocked and said their price manipulations should be illegal, while others said if they owned the diamonds they could market them however they wanted, and it was good for their own business to do what they do, so no problem. So that’s a nice controversial one for starters!

New content today:

Creative game design part 2

This evening I had the second lesson of my 6-week course on Creative Thinking & Problem Solving, with game design as a practical exercise. We did brainstorming, and came up with a bunch of wacky ideas for games. Some examples of the ideas for game themes that the stidents and I came up with:

A cooking competition
A doctor examining patients
Causing trouble in school
Ruining someone’s wedding

I really like the last one, and kind of hope we end up developing that one into a game, but I’m planning to be guided by what the students think when we come back to the ideas next week.

Today daylight saving began here in New South Wales, by the way, so all my classes are now an hour later – because I’ve kept them the same time for all the students in other countries. I need to go through every class and decide if I want to move it another hour later when the northern hemisphere goes off daylight saving at the end of October. That will be to keep them at the same time for European and American countries that have DST. I think a lot of Asian countries don’t have DST at all, so classes with Asian students won’t need to move. It’s a bit of juggling, and I’m going to have to end up telling some of the students that their classes will be shifting in time, so they might have to move to another class or possibly unenrol if they cant find a suitable timeslot. And then in 6 months I have to go through this all in the other direction.

But I’m happy that sunset is now an hour later (by the clock). I love the long light summer evenings. Speaking of which, it was very warm and summery today, with a temperature of 26°C. I went on another walk with my wife and Scully, just around our local area from home today. There were a lot of people out enjoying the warmth, with dozens of people having picnics in various parks that we walked past. Picnics were only authorised a week or two ago as COVID lockdown restrictions slowly ease here, and plenty of people are taking advantage of it.

I want to make use of the warm weather and evening sunlight to have a picnic dinner with my wife for our wedding anniversary, which is coming up in a few weeks. Not on the exact day, but some time during that week. It’ll be nice to sit in a park, with a view over the harbour, and have a pleasant dinner.

New content today:

Splendid meals

Today I made the slides for the second lesson in my creative thinking course, based on the lesson plan I wrote up yesterday.

This evening I had two more ethics classes, on animal hunting. I’ve been ending the classes with a question for the kids to think about, without answering it: Experts say one of the biggest dangers facing the world is overpopulation of humans. What if an advanced alien species came by Earth and saw our population problems. Would it be okay for them to hunt humans?

In the second class today we’d previously discussed whether it’s okay to hunt overpopulated animals, and all the kids had been very affirmative that not only was it okay, but it was necessary to protect the greater environment. So… I got to the end of the class and left them with the above question to ponder, and one of the girls who I could see on the Zoom video silently did The Scream pose, and then slid her hands up to cover the top of her head as she continued the look of horror. It was really amusing to see!

This evening for dinner my wife and I ordered a special treat from a local Greek restaurant that we like to visit now and then. It’s a nice change from ordering pizzas. I went up to pick up the meal and we had spanakopita and roasted lamb shanks, with Greek salad. And there’s sticky date pudding for afters.

Tonight is online games night with my friends. We started with the game Splendor, which I haven’t played for a long time, and have always been really bad at. I thought I was winning, but then all of a sudden someone else took a huge lead and won the game, and I ended up third.

New content today:

Game design week 2 planning

It seems I’m spending all my time writing class material these days! Today I put the finishing touches on the lesson for week 2 of my Creative Thinking & Problem Solving course, which is using game design as an example. Week 2 is all about brainstorming – coming up with as many ideas as possible, and trying to make them diverse and original. I came up with some exercises to go through to prompt the kids to think creatively, and tried them out on my wife, and she was very impressed. So I’m pretty happy with that!

Taking Scully out for a walk today, we noticed that the bare dirt on the hill in the park across the street had been changed again since yesterday:

They’ve recovered it in fresh turf! So they killed the grass with herbicide, then decided they didn’t want to landscape that area, then they scraped all the dead grass away, and now they’ve laid brand new grass. To be honest, I’m not actually unhappy about this, because the old grass was riddled with bindii (i.e. Soliva sessilis), and it’s just coming up to bindii season, in which patches of grass infested with this weed develop needle-sharp spines that make them painful to walk on. Scully feels these in her feet and tries to avoid walking on grass with any bindii in it. And this slope is one of her favourite areas to run around and lie on. So having fresh new grass there will be good.

New content today:

Planning for how to do planning

Today I had a Zoom meeting with the lecturer of the Data Engineering course that I’m helping to redesign for next year, as well as one of the university staff working in the area of assisting lecturers to plan and design their courses. She had a lot of good input on various teaching methods and ways we could approach delivering the material. I took a lot of notes, and we also went through a bunch of online tools that we can sue to coordinate the course redesign.

I need to get stuck into that soon, but first I had to finish off the lesson plan for this week’s online ethics classes in time for teaching three of those this evening. I don’t think I had quite enough written yesterday, so I added a few extra questions.

I’m a bit concerned about the landscaping work that council workers are doing in the park across the street. You may remember a couple of weeks ago I reported on them killing the grass on the slope facing the street. And that when I phoned the project manager to find out if herbicide had been used, she said that they had originally planned to remove the grass, but now had decided not to change it – so they killed the grass for no reason.

Well, today it looked like this:

They’ve removed the dead grass, leaving bare soil. Obviously in preparation for doing something with it, but I’m not sure what yet. They have done some landscaping with bark chips and new plants in the small area at the bottom of the photo, but that was done and completed before the dead grass was removed – so I don’t think they’re going to extend that treatment to the whole area.

The problem is that they’ve left bare soil today… and the next three days in Sydney are forecast to be extremely wet, with possible thunderstorms each day. I expect the rain will wash a lot of that soil off that quite steep slope. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens and what sort of muddy mess is left at the end of the week.

New content today:

Thinking of creative thinking part 2

Most of today I spent planning out the second lesson of my creative thinking course. It was real knuckle down and get stuff done time. I took a break to take Scully to the dog park. It looks like it might be the only good chance this week, with heavy rain and possible thunderstorms forecast for Wednesday to Friday.

New content today:

Image processing projects

I spent much of today on ethics stuff – teaching the final class of the superheroes subject this morning, then writing a lesson plan for the new week’s topic starting on Wednesday, which is on hunting animals.

This evening was the next lecture in the image processing course that I’m tutoring. The subject material is done and this was the presentation of the assignments and kicking off the students working on their assessment tasks. The students are divided into teams of 5-6 students, and each team needs to decide on an image processing project to work on over the next few weeks. They have three tasks:

Write a specification for their project, describing the image processing task they want to perform, the dataset they are going to use, what image processing methods they plan to use, and how they are going to assess the success of their task.
Write and document software to perform the specified task, then analyse the performance.
Present a video report showing what they did and describing the performance.

After explaining the tasks, the lecturer sent everyone to Microsoft Teams to work on the ideas for their projects. I bounced around several of the teams, answering questions and providing advice on the various ideas they had for something to work on. They’ve settled on an interesting range of projects, including car number plate detection and reading, detection of COVID face masks, detection and differentiation of lung lesions in x-rays caused by either cancer or COVID, recognising and decoding sign language from video of hands, tracking cars in traffic videos, and classifying objects and landforms on the ground from aerial photos. It’s going to be an interesting few weeks helping the students do these things, and then seeing the results they get!

New content today:

First class for game design

This evening I had the first class in my new 6-week course on Creative Thinking & Problem Solving, with practical exercises on designing a board game. I have two students, who’ve both come from my ethics classes. I was a little worried that I might not have enough material to fill the hour, but in the end I had to rush a little bit towards the end to squeeze it all in. I didn’t need to leave anything out, so that’s good!

One of the kids said his favourite game was Dungeons & Dragons, so that was cool. And he said he’d tried to make a board game before, but it didn’t turn out very well. So hopefully he’ll learn a lot of cool things about problem solving and designing games that will help him in the future.

The weather today has turned cold again. We’re in the spring phase of having nice and quite warm days, interspersed with some chilly days as the weather systems move across the continent.

And… I’m a bit worn out. That new class plus two ethics classes tonight, after a day of housecleaning and also working on some comics stuff.

New content today:

Wreck Bay Track

This morning I did another exploratory bushwalk with my wife and Scully. Scouting within the 5 km radius of home to find somewhere new, I found the Wreck Bay walking track.

This is a bush track that skirts around the edge of Northbridge Golf Club, between the lower stretches of the golf course and the waters of Middle Harbour below.

It’s a lush forest environment, with plenty of ferns and moss. We passed a few tiny creeks and small waterfalls.

You emerge at various points to views of Middle Harbour.

I found a pair of rainbow lorikeets nesting in this tree hollow. There were eggs or babies inside, but I couldn’t get high enough to see or photograph them. But the parents were hanging around to protect them and not flying away, as I got within a metre or so to take this photo.

This (above) is the small inlet known as Wreck Bay, named for the large shipwreck you can see in the water just above the centre of the image. The dark shadows to the left are the front of the hull, and parts of the rear of the hull can be seen projecting above the water to the right.

Scully enjoyed the walk too.

The bushwalk part was at low elevation, close to the water, but towards the end we had to climb uphill. We emerged onto streets and did a loop up the hill, around Northbridge Golf Club, and the downhill on the other side of the golf course back to the car.

Here’s a view from the top of the golf course. You can see how high up we are now compared to the steep valley. The golf course is on a steep slope, and there’s a lot of downhill and uphill walking when playing it.

Finally a view over Flat Rock Creek Gully as we walked back down the hill. The walk we did last week was along the course of Flat Rock Creek ending in the park down below (before we walked back home).

After getting home and having some lunch, I spent all afternoon working on slides for the first lesson of my Creative Thinking course, which begins tomorrow. I have them nearly done – just need to think of some good homework tasks for the kids to do before the second lesson.

New content today:

Course planning x2

This morning I went out to pick up the weekly groceries, which I’d ordered online. Strawberries are still super cheap, so I picked up another couple of punnets while I was there. I suppose I should try remember to just order them as part of the online ordering.

One quirk of the supermarket online shopping system is that if you search for something like “strawberries” it displays a page of results full of strawberry yoghurt, strawberry ice cream, strawberry jam, and some other things, and actual strawberries don’t even appear until the second page of search results. It’s similar with most search terms – I tried to find basil or something and ended up with a page full of basil-oil-infused shampoos and similar stuff, again with actual basil on the second page of results. I wonder if this is deliberate, forcing you to scroll past unrelated products in the same way that they force you to walk past aisles of stuff in order to get the milk at the back of the store.

Back home I worked on making new Darths & Droids comics. I wanted to get that done before lunch, so I could work on course material for both the Data Engineering course that I’m revising for the university, and also the Creative Thinking course that I’ll be starting on Outschool on Sunday. I have two kids enrolled now, so I’ll be going ahead with it this week, after last week’s delay because I only had the one enrolment. So I have to make some more slides for that, and possibly even start thinking about the second week’s lesson.

I had a really interesting lesson with the ethics of superheroes this evening too. I had a class with two kids. I asked the question:

There was an online comic a few years ago that pointed out that Superman could do more good in the world not by fighting crime, but by turning a generator to make electricity. This could power the world, stop CO2 emissions, and save the environment and millions of people. Should Superman stop fighting crime and do this instead?

The first kid, a boy, said no, Superman’s whole point is to fight crime, so that’s what he should do. The second, a girl, started, “Well, If I was Superman and they asked me to do that…”

I expected her to say: “I’d say no, I want to fight crime, not turn a generator all day.”

But she said: “I’d definitely do it! I wouldn’t have to go out and catch criminals, and I could just set up a TV and watch shows all day while I turn the handle.”

So that was fun! And tonight is online board games night with the guys. We’ve tried a new game for me: Incan Gold, which is a quick press-your-luck game themed on raiding ancient temples for gems. Not gold, interestingly.

New content today: