Tag: teaching

Busy week, Tuesday

I needed to get a Darths & Droids strip written and assembled today – that was my first deadline. After knocking that off I had to work on my lesson plan for tomorrow night’s new ethics class topic, on “Psychic Powers”. Then I had to go through the lecture notes for next week’s image processing lecture which I’ll be giving at the university, because this afternoon before the class I met with the professor to go over them and make sure I cover the material fully.

Leaving early to do this meant I didn’t have a lot of time to do anything else. I dropped Scully at my wife’s work on the way into the university. Then after the meeting I had a break to go grab some dinner before the evening lecture. I went across the road and grabbed some Thai fried rice.

And that was the day!

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Busy week, Monday

I have a busy week this week. Tomorrow I need to go into the university early to meet with the lecturer of the Image Processing course that I’m tutoring for. He will be away next week and I’m going to be delivering the lecture that week, so I need to go through the lecture material with him to make sure I cover everything properly. We also need to work out a way for me to present the slides, since last year when I did my guest lecture on the Science and Engineering of Photography I couldn’t get the university presentation system to connect to my (wife’s) Macbook.

Wednesday we have a guy coming to install our new induction cooktop and remove the old gas cooktop. (I wrote about us exploring this last year.) This is going to be a slightly complex job, because after the inspection he did a few weeks ago (which I apparently didn’t write about), the conclusion was that we need to have our entire circuitbreaker board replaced, and some new cabling run through the wall cavities. So this means the power will be off for probably a few hours, and I won’t be able to work on things like writing my ethics class lesson plans. So I need to get them done… tomorrow.

This morning I had the last three classes of the “Colonising Space” topic. The new topic for this week’s younger kids is “Psychic Powers”. Remember this is also a critical thinking class, so we’ll be exercising those skills a lot this week!

This evening I had lesson 4 in the current Creative Thinking/Game Design class. The student has converged on several game mechanic ideas for a haunted house themed game. And this is the week where I need to actually put it into a workable game design and send him a copy of the game to play by the weekend! So I need to squeeze this in somewhere this week as well.

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Tuesday teaching and Wednesday football

I missed my update yesterday because I was busy at the University of Technology Sydney at my first class for the semester on this year’s course on Image Processing. I missed the first class last week due to thinking it was on Thursday, but after moving my ethics classes from Tuesday to Thursday I made sure to make it this week. The class is packed, with about 200 students in the lecture room, definitely more than last year. Which I’ll take as a god sign that it’s a popular class.

Today I worked on my lesson plans for this week’s new ethics topics: Colonising Space for the 10-12 year olds, and Government for the 13-15 year olds. I competed those, and also went out for a nice lunch with my wife at a local Greek restaurant. Then tonight it was the first three space colony classes.

A question I asked during the class: Can colonising space benefit all of humanity and not just the wealthy who get to travel to new worlds, leaving poor people behind on an Earth troubled by wars or environmental disasters? I was surprised by a few students saying that it’d actually be good for the poor people to get rid of the wealthy elite! Anyway, it seems to be a good topic and we had a lot of fun discussing it.

And now straight after those classes we’re into the FIFA Women’s World Cup semi-final, Australia v England. I’m typing this at half time, with England up 1-0. It’s going to be a very tense second half, needing to come equalise and then try to find a lead somehow.

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Game design theme: haunted house

This morning I taught the last three lessons of the “Ethical Consumerism” topic with the younger kids.

Then for lunch I took Scully for a walk to the fish & chip shop and we sat on the hill lookout spot watching the dark grey clouds looming over the city.

Grey day over Sydney

This evening I had the third class in the current course on Creative Thinking and Game Design. After brainstorming ideas last week we’ve converged on “exploring a haunted house” as the theme of the game. We brainstormed some possible goals, including escaping the house, or trying to find a specific item, or even being scientists and trying to photograph ghosts. And we also worked on some potential mechanics, including one using sliding board tiles to represent shifting rooms in the house.

Next week we’ll out the pieces together and try to make a workable game out of these ideas.

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More possible D&D, and an epic level miscommunication

Let’s start low key. This morning I finished off the lesson plan for this week’s older kids’ ethics class, on the topic of Probability. I did half of it yesterday so it wasn’t a lot of work.

For lunch I went on a walk with my wife and Scully, the longest regular walk we do, to the Italian bakery. On the way we went through the local shopping area and walked past the local science toy shop. As we passed, I noticed a poster in the window advertising free Dungeons & Dragons events in the store, for beginner players. I commented to my wife that I should see if they want another Dungeon Master to help run games, and she said I should go in right now and ask them. So I did!

I spoke to a woman and mentioned I’ve been running D&D since the 1980s and would be interested in running some games if they needed more people. She said yes, they definitely could use someone! She took my details and said the guy who organises the D&D events would be in touch to discuss it. They run it every Saturday evening from 6pm, and she said it’s mostly children, but sometimes they have adults join in to play as well. I wouldn’t want to do it every week, but maybe every 3 or 4 weeks would be cool. And given how much experience I have with teaching children, I think I could run a pretty cool game for a group of kids.

This afternoon just before my ethics classes began (three in a row), I decided to check my university email account to make sure everything was fine for tomorrow’s first lecture in this semester’s image processing course. I’ve been all set for the past week to go into the university for the first time tomorrow.

I opened my email and there was a message from the lecturer, asking me if everything was okay, because I missed the first lecture on Tuesday night! Yes, it turns out the course is being run on Tuesdays this year, not Thursdays like I thought! I replied and apologised for the miscommunication, saying I’d thought it was Thursdays. We went back through our email chains and discovered that he had told me it was on Tuesdays, but only in one email from December last year. I can’t remember if it registered at the time, but for months now I’ve been thinking it was on Thursdays.

So next week I need to go in on Tuesday, not Thursday. Another issue is that I have three Outschool ethics classes on Tuesday evening, which clash. So I’ve had to move them to Thursday and inform all the students that this is an unavoidable move. I know some of them probably won’t be able to attend Thursdays and will have to drop the class, so it’s a bit of a pain, but hopefully most of them can adjust to the new day.

So, it’s been a very mixed day. Some good news with the D&D stuff, but quite the mess with the evening classes.

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Just writing more lessons

Today I mostly spent writing up new lessons for the coming week of ethics classes. One on “Stealing” for the younger kids, and on “Literature” for the older ones.

In between I took Scully for a long walk over to the Italian bakery a few suburbs away, to have a slice of pizza for lunch. Today they had a special maple/pecan danish, which I had to try as I think this is a great combination of flavours.

The weather was nice and sunny, and we’re in for a warm few days coming up, with temperatures hovering around 23°C. If that sounds warm for midwinter, yes, it’s unseasonally warm and it really has been most of winter. We’re not complaining yet, but who knows what this summer is going to bring?

Last night I started watching Bird Box: Barcelona on Netflix. I liked the first Bird Box, and was curious to see this sequel. There’s something a bit different going on and it’s not clear yet. I watched half the film and will finish it off tonight. I do this a lot with movies nowadays – I just don’t have enough time in the evenings after my classes to watch a full movie, so I always stretch them out over two nights.

All my friends are talking about Barbie and Oppenheimer at the cinemas. I think Oppenheimer would be interesting, especially given my background in physics, though I don’t know if I’ll manage to get to a cinema to see it.

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Time to get creative again!

I’m again running my Outschool class on “Creative Thinking & Problem Solving” with a practical project on designing a board game, for students aged 11-14 years. It’s a 6-week course starting Monday 31 July, with a 1-hour class at 6pm (Sydney time) each week. If you have or know a kid who likes games or would enjoy a class in creativity, check it out.

And speaking of creativity, I spent most of this afternoon photographing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, ready to start new updates again tonight. That, combined with 3 ethics classes in the morning, pretty much used up my whole day. Phew!

I’ve also started thinking about travel to Finland in November, for the next ISO Photography standards meeting, which is in Tampere. There are a few things to organise, such as a dog-sitter for Scully, before we can lock down dates and then start organising flights and hotels. Because Europe is so far away, we’re thinking of combining it again with a week or so somewhere else in Europe. Preferably somewhere not so cold! Perhaps Italy in November will be nice.

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Day full of Zoom meetings

I had outschool ethics classes at 8am and 9am, followed immediately by a Zoom meeting from 10-12 for planning the agenda for the ISO Photography standards meeting in Japan in two weeks.

Then at 1pm I had another Zoom meeting, this time with the professor of the university courses I’m tutoring. We’re gearing up for running the Image Processing and Pattern Recognition course again in semester two (beginning in August), and he wanted to go over some suggestions that I ad at the end of last year’s course for improving the course material and presentation. I’d written a list of things, and we went over those so he understood everything. I would be happy to help produce some of the extra diagrams I suggested, but I’m very busy the next few weeks preparing and then travelling to Japan, and also he didn’t want me working on course material without getting paid and he doesn’t have budget for that.

Tonight I have another ISO Zoom meeting, scheduled for 11pm-midnight my time. This is an ad-hoc group meeting for the depth camera performance topic. I missed the last one two weeks ago because I was sick. I may skip this one too, because honestly I don’t contribute much to the discussion, as it’s the others who are doing experiments with the equipment in their labs.

In between I took Scully for a couple of walks, avoiding the large band of rain that crossed Sydney in mid-afternoon. For dinner I made spätzle with split pea soup. My mother used to make spätzle a lot when I was growing up, and I made it a bit too when I first moved out, but haven’t done it much for many years now. I should do it more often.

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Last day of Data Engineering class

The university Data Engineering course ends this week. The students have until Friday night to submit their final reports and presentation videos, but today was the last tutorial session. I went in after my three morning ethics classes.

When I got into the city, I noticed everything was wet from rain, with puddles everywhere as though it had been very recent, although I hadn’t noticed any rain all morning, and the sky was mostly clear. There were a few dark clouds around the horizon, so they must have blown over and dumped rain on the city quickly.

The class went generally well, except for one annoying thing which I probably shouldn’t go into further here. Suffice to say I needed to call the professor to deal with queries from some of the students.

At home tonight I made satay sauce to go with steamed broccoli, green beans, and rice. And I threw a few cashews in for good measure. I use this recipe for satay sauce, tweaking the amounts slightly to taste – well, I never measure them exactly to start with, so I end up adjusting things a bit after tasting. I’ve found it’s the best of a few that I’ve tried. Oh, I also add a bit of turmeric as well.

Monday has been my busy day since the Data Engineering class started, but now I get a bit of a reprieve, before Image Processing starts on Thursday nights on second semester.

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Revising the ninja game

This morning I had lesson 5 in the Creative Thinking/Game Design course with the kids. We went over our playtesting notes for the Ninja Grandma game. The kids had some cool ideas, including changing the ninja castle from a fixed board to a variable layout using tiles for each room, and making the layout matter by having the ninjas move from room to room, rather than be placed anywhere. Now I need to revise the game and send it back to them for another round of playtesting before the final lesson next Sunday.

I did a bit more comics work, assembling Irregular Webcomic! strips for the coming week. And tonight was three more ethics classes. And … wow, where did the day go?

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