teaching – Page 5 – dangermouse.net

Turkeys, turkeys, everywhere

Around where we live it’s easy to find Australian brushturkeys. Here’s a photo I took of one a while back:

They’re big birds, and have become more and more common in this area over the years. They scrape for food in leaf litter, and this time of year they build large mounds of litter and mulch to incubate their eggs, using the warmth of the decaying mulch rather than sitting on the eggs. So they move around a lot of leaf litter. And this year in particular I’ve been noticing that a lot of the footpaths we walk on around the neighbourhood are constantly being covered in a layer of leaf litter, sometimes so thick that you almost have to wade through it. While the adjacent garden beds are scraped clear of mulch and have large patches of bare soil.

There’s been a bit of this in previous years but this year it’s particularly bad. I’m guessing a lot of residents are constantly scraping or sweeping mulch back into the gardens and off the footpaths, or maybe their are council workers going around and doing it. I’m starting to wonder how much of this the gardens can take before the birds become real pests and start having an adverse effect on plants. Being native birds they’re a protected species, so there’s nothing anyone can do about them, legally.

In other news today, I received my Kickstarter copy of Dungeon Crawl Classics #100: The Music of the Spheres is Chaos. This is a wacky dungeon adventure with some cool bonus stuff because it’s the 100th adventure in Goodman Games’s series. Should be fun!

And tonight was another project tutorial session at the university for the image processing course. For dinner beforehand I tried a new burger and wings place. I had the chicken burger with peri-peri sauce, which came with a side of chips. It was pretty good! I’d go back here again some other time. Though not this semester since I’m still trying to eat somewhere different and new every week.

And after the project session with the students, the professor, who’s an old colleague from the previous jobs we did together at Canon, asked me if I wanted to fill in for him in teaching the next 18 months worth of his courses, as he has an offer to do some outsourced research work which will take up all his teaching time. This means I’d be organising the courses and giving the lectures for the courses – which involves some time commitment, but also extra income. And it’s a great opportunity to do some more university level teaching. So I’m very interested! I just need to see how many hours a week of work will be required, and fit that into my current Outschool schedule.

So this is pretty big news, and I’m a bit excited!

New content today:

More marking; and Success and Failure

I finished off my marking for the image processing course today. As in previous semesters, this was followed by a tedious hour or so of pasting all the marks and comments into the university online interface – 10 separate entries for each of the 54 students I’d been assigned. I was very glad once I got that finished!

This evening I had the first three classes on my new ethics topic: Success and Failure. I think they went pretty well. This topic has less of me talking and more questions for the students to answer than the previous one I did on Dinosaurs, so it feels a lot more interactive, which is good.

This afternoon I read an article on the ABC News site about pears falling out of favour with Australian consumers relative to other fruits, with the result that a lot of pear farmers are finding the crop to be no longer commercially viable, and are removing pear orchards. This prompted two things:

Firstly, a conversation on with my friends on Discord in which two of them revealed that they never realised that pears are sold in supermarkets in an unripe state and that they ripen and soften over several days in the home. Both of them said they never thought much of pears, as they were too hard, crunchy, and bland compared to apples. I was amazed that they’d apparently never experienced the fact that pears soften considerably as they ripen, nor had the pleasure of eating a nicely ripe pear.

Secondly, I resolved to go out and buy some pears! When I went out with Scully for a walk after lunch I popped into the local grocery store and grabbed four nice Packham pears. Which are very firm now, but will ripen and soften nicely in the next few days. And one of my pear-incredulous friends also went out and bought himself some pears today as well, to experiment and try to experience this phenomenon of ripe pears himself.

I don’t know if it’ll be enough to convince the farmers to keep growing pears, but I certainly hope they don’t end up disappearing from our supermarket fruit sections.

New content today:

Marking, marking, lecturing

Today was full of work for the university image processing course. I spent much of the day marking student reports. Then late in the afternoon I took Scully up to my wife’s work and played tag team, so she could take her home while I hopped on a train into the city.

I continued my quest to have dinner at a different place every week, this time trying a random Chinese place that I found by wandering around. It had a bunch of barbecue ducks hanging in the front window, and a room of empty tables since it was pretty early to eat dinner. An old Chinese woman took my oder, but I don’t think she understood any English, and she tried to ask me a question in Chinese that I didn’t understand. But I got the meal I wanted, just a simple dish of fried noodles with some mixed seafood. It was okay, but nothing special.

At the university I gave the guest lecture tonight on Human Vision and Colour Perception. This is jus a special informative lecture for the students, non-assessable, but related to the work they’re studying on computer image processing. I think the students found it interesting, and a few said afterwards they liked it, and had some questions about it.

New content today:

Starting project marking; rampant e-bikes

This morning I finished off the Dinosaurs topic with my last three ethics classes. I had to move one class an hour earlier, filling in the gap between it and the previous class, because I had an appointment at lunch time with a doctor. Fortunately the students all said last week they could make it an hour earlier. Next week it’ll be back to the normal time.

After lunch I was walking with Scully and I came out of a narrow pedestrian path perpendicular to a main road, stepped out past the corner of the building, and nearly got hit by a food delivery e-bike speeding along the footpath. I had to step back to avoid being hit. And then I heard a screech as the driver put the brakes on hard, and when I turned to look, he’d only barely managed to stop in time to avoid hitting an old man, maybe late 60s. The old man gave the rider an earful!

These food delivery e-bikes have become a menace in many parts of Sydney. They’re not legally allowed to ride on pedestrian footpaths, but they all do it. Some are reasonably careful, but others are real cowboys and just try to go as fast as they can, dodging precariously between pedestrians. There have been several serious accidents in the past year or so. I wonder if police will crack down on them at some point – because at the moment there seems to be no enforcement of the law.

This afternoon I began marking the first student project reports from the current university image processing course. The first one I grabbed was a real treat – probably the best report I’ve read in my three years of teaching this course. Though it might be all downhill from here!

Later tonight I have the last lesson in my current Creative Thinking and Game Design course. It’ll be good to wrap another one of those up!

New content today:

Online teaching country 46

I keep track of where students in my Outschool classes are connecting from. Today I recorded my 46th country: Zambia. t was actually a girl who normally connects from her home in Wales, but she’s currently travelling with her family, and joined my class from Zambia. So that’s pretty cool! I also have another student who live in Italy, who joined this week from Thailand. It’s so cool that some students are continuing to do my classes even while on vacation.

Most of today I spent working on new Darths & Droids comics, trying to build up the buffer before my own trip in November. I took Scully out for a walk at lunch and got fish & chips, eating them at my favourite lookout.

That’s about it, not much else to report today.

New content today:

A very brief trip into the university

This afternoon I dropped Scully at my wife’s work and hopped on a train into the city to head to the University of Technology Sydney for tonight’s image processing lecture. In the city I stopped at a Malaysian restaurant near the university for dinner. This is part of my plan to try a new restaurant every week during this semester. I had some curry puffs, and a beef rendang with roti. It was okay – the roti was excellent, the rendang was tasty but a bit fatty, which I don’t like, and the curry puffs were a little disappointing. Oh well, they can’t all be winners.

After eating, I got to the university and noticed it was a lot emptier than normal. There’s usually a huge queue in the main building foyer every Tuesday where they hand out free noodle soup meals for students, but that wasn’t there, and there were barely any students around. I got to the lecture room, and the electronic timetable showed that the room had nothing booked for the evening. I texted the lecturer to ask if the lecture was on, and he replied saying that it was mid-semester break!

So I had to come straight back home again. So, wow, that was a bit of a waste of an evening. At least I got home in time to spend a bit of time writing up my lesson plan for this week’s new ethics class, on Pets.

I did manage to get a nice sunset photo at the university though:

New content today:

Seeing into the future: Crystal balls!

Monday morning is the regular end-of-ethics-week final classes in the morning. Morning classes are usually full of kids from North America, because it’s early evening over there. Honestly I was glad to be finished this week’s Energy topic, for reasons I touched on earlier. I tried to revise the plan on the fly to include more open-ended discussion questions, and it worked a bit, but was still not as open as I’d have liked. Never mind, on to the new topic! It’s on Pets, and I’ll write the plan tomorrow.

This afternoon I worked solidly on Irregular Webcomic! I made 10 new strips, using the photos I took a few weeks ago. I now have a full 3-week buffer, which will hopefully give me time to write new strips and take more photos before it runs out.

Tonight was lesson 3 in my current instance of the Creative Thinking/Board Game Design class. This is where the course gets really interesting and fun, as we converge down the brainstorming ideas we did last week and come up with a theme for the game we’ll be designing. After the three students voted, we had two theme ideas on equal footing: Colonising lands, and “a shiny crystal ball”. I did a tie-break and selected what I think is the more interesting option, the crystal ball. So… we’re designing a board game about crystal balls!

We’ve already thought of one possible rules mechanic. During the game set up, you lay out a series of cards face down, which represent things that happen on future turns of the game, and by using a crystal ball you get to look at a future card. So you know what will happen on that turn. Then you can use that knowledge to your advantage. Perhaps the rules require you to reveal or hint something about the future to the other players, or perhaps you can bluff about it. Next week we’ll work on more mechanics and refining the game rules into something workable.

New content today:

Beach trip, and Outschool training

Today at lunch I took Scully on a drive to the beach. I went to my favourite pie shop to get pies and we sat on the grass just above the beach to eat them. After the hot weather of the past few days, today was chilly, with a strong wind blowing cold off the ocean. While it was chilly, it was a welcome change from the record hot weather.

Walking around the peninsula a bit, we stopped here to get a photo of some of the birds that always hang out here. Here’s an Australian pelican, a little black cormorant, and a bunch of silver gulls.

I also stopped at the cricket field to let Scully off leash and have a bit of a run around.

I get her to “sit” and “stay”, while I walk away about 20 metres, then I call her to “come”, and she comes running.

She expects a treat for this!

This afternoon I did some educational training, which is being organised by Outschool. They’ve aded a teacher accreditation program and you can choose to get a badge on your teacher profile for completing a series of webinar training videos. I figured this would be a good thing to attract more parents, so I’ve started the course. Today I watched a 1-hour video about enabling inquiry-based learning for science subjects, and then did a quiz. I’ll get credit for it and then need to do a few more similar things. It was actually pretty interesting!

New content today:

A new game design course running again

This morning I finished off the week of ethics lessons on the “Brain Uploading” topic. There’s been a very wide range of reactions to the idea of scanning someone’s brain and running a copy/simulation on a computer. Some kids think it’s cool and want one, some think it’s weird, but they could learn to get along with chatting with one, and some think it’s an abomination and want nothing to do with it. One went so far as to say that if a friend got a brainscan copy running on a computer, they’d stop being friends with them.

In the middle of the day I had a nice break, taking Scully for a long walk over to the Italian bakery and back. I had a bit of lunch there and brought home some Italian biscuits for dessert tonight.

My wife came home from work just after lunch, to work from home for the afternoon. This gave me the opportunity to go for a 2.5k run before having a shower and heading out with her and Scully for an evening walk after work, as the sun was setting. It was chilly, but nice in the sunset light. I made Thai green curry vegetables and rice for dinner.

And then later this evening I had the first lesson in a new iteration of my 6-week Creative Thinking and Game Design course. With three students, this should be more fun than last time I ran it, with just one student. The first lesson is a bit cram-packed with information, and I think the kids were a bit overloaded by the end of it. But thankfully the next few have a bit less content and it will ease off as we progress through the weeks.

New content today:

My first university lecture!

This evening I had my first official university lecture! The professor for the Image Processing course I’m currently tutoring for was away this week, and he asked me to fill in and deliver the lecture. I did a guest lecture for this course last year, during the project phase, but that wasn’t assessable and I didn’t get paid for it. But this lecture tonight is an integral part of the coursework, and I get paid for it!

The lecture was about feature detection, including going through Moravec corner and Harris corner detection, the structure tensor, the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm, and Bag of Words model. This sets up the groundwork for the beginning of looking at machine learning for image recognition, classification, and object identification, in next week’s lecture.

I think it went really well! During the tutorial exercise section, where the students work on problems and we walk around answering questions, one group said to me that this lecture finally made the whole course come together for them – giving context to what the preliminary fundamentals in the previous three lectures were leading up to, in a way that now made sense for real world image processing applications. So that was good! They even gave me a cookie – the group had been sharing a big box of them during the lecture.

Before heading into the city for the lecture, I spent time making a Darths & Droids comic, and dealing with a bunch of OUtschool administration. I’m constantly getting emails and requests from parents for different class times and for moving their kids into different classes. I’ve also set up a new iteration of the Creative Thinking and Problem Solving (Board Game Design) class, starting on 11 September, for a parent who wanted it. That starts the week after the current course in progress ends. The good news is that this parent has enrolled two kids into the class! That’s great because running it with just one student is not so much fun.

New content today: