Tag: teaching

Data project marking – lots of work

Today I had two ethics classes first thing, one with the new Creativity topic for older kids. That was a really fun class. The older kids are good because the class progresses more like an organic conversation abut the topic, rather than me leading the class and asking questions so much, as with the younger kids.

The rest of the day I dedicated to marking the Data Engineering project planning reports. I had five reports to read through and mark on a bunch of specified criteria. As usual, some were better than others. I wrote comprehensive comments for all of them, to assist the students with the second half of their projects, now underway. And then I have to paste them all in one at a time into the university marking system, for each student in each team – so something like 30 students, with 6 separate fields for each student, and then enter the marks as well for each section… so it’s something like 180 copy/paste operations plus 180 instances of typing numbers into fields, being super careful not to make a typo anywhere, as that could result in a student getting the wrong grade.

I took a break for lunch, to take Scully for a walk. I managed to get a table at a cafe and had a seafood pie. This is a really nice pie, with chunks of salmon and white fish, prawns, and I think maybe scallops, in a creamy sauce.

The afternoon was finishing off the marking. Then I made some pasta for dinner, and after that tried to work on writing some Darths & Droids comics, since I’ve reduced the buffer to zero again thanks to being so busy this week. Phew!

New content today:

Second last Data class

Monday is my busiest day. Ethics online from 8am to midday. Then taking Scully out for a quick walk, before returning home to shower and change for the afternoon’s tutorial session at the University. I take Scully to my wife’s work and hop on the train, and arrive just in time to grab some salted caramel cookies to sustain me during the session.

The project planning report was in for each team and I skimmed through all of the ones I’m assigned to mark, so I could talk to the students and give them any advice for the experimental work they are planning on doing in the next two weeks. A few of the teams look in control but some were clearly floundering a little, and I spent time with a couple of the teams going over their experiment plans, and the statistical methods they should be using. I forget sometimes that this is a first year course, so the students are less than a year out of high school. I talk to them about Fourier transforms and stuff and then when they look at me blankly I realise they don’t even know what those are.

There was another odd issue which popped up. One student was obviously a native French speaker, and using French software on their laptop. They were exporting data from Excel in CSV format and trying to import into Matlab. But the numbers were coming across all wrong. After scratching my head for a minute I realised it’s because French Excel exports decimal numbers with commas instead of decimal points (and uses semicolons instead of commas to separate the fields, but Matlab handled that okay).

Next Monday is the last tutorial session, and the final project report is due on Friday next week. Then I’m free again on Monday afternoons! Then in semester two I’ll be doing the Image Processing course again on Thursday evenings.

New content today:

Big teaching day – animals and machine learning

I finished off the week of the current ethics topic with my last three classes of kids this morning. I got some interestingly diverse answers on whether our general reaction to cockroaches would change from “yuk; kill!” if they could speak with us. One kid said they might be really interesting to talk to and we could make friend with them. Another said she’d still kill them, but she’d feel more guilty about it.

After that I did a quick walk with Scully, then returned home to shower and change quickly before heading in to the university for this afternoon’s Data Engineering session. The professor liked the slides on machine learning I prepared on Saturday and let me present them to the students. It only took about 15 minutes, and they seemed to get a lot out of it, as a late introduction of context and motivation for the machine learning lecture they had a few weeks ago.

It was another busy session after that, walking around the tables and chatting with several groups about the progress of their projects, and answering various questions for them. Some teams seem to be doing well, while… others needed a bit of guidance.

Back home tonight, I made pizza for dinner using dough that my wife made when she got home from work. Pumpkin, feta, and walnuts, on a pesto sauce base. And now I can relax, after my week’s busy day!

New content today:

Game design convergence – grandma ninjas!

Sunday morning 10am – lesson 3 in my current iteration of my Creative Thinking & Game Design course. The students and I went through the potential themes for board games that we brainstormed last week, narrowing it down to a list of eight. After some constructive criticism of each idea, it came to picking the one theme that we will work on.

Student 1 picked his favourite. Student 2 picked hers, which was different. I asked for second preferences, and both picked other different things, so now we had four different options with no overlap!

To break the deadlock I suggested how about we combine the two favourite ideas, which were:

  • Ninjas – a ninja training course where we try to become the best ninja
  • Grandma’s evil mansion – a quest to find things in the mansion to defeat the evil grandma

So I said what about a ninja grandma? And both kids went, “YEAH!” So that’s the theme of our game. We’re not sure what the ninja grandma does yet – maybe players can be ninja grandkids and the grandma is training you or sending you on missions. Or maybe each player can be a different competing ninja grandma, training their own group of ninjas. We’ll figure that out next week.

Today’s weather was surprisingly nice, after the forecast 60 mm of rain bypassed Sydney and dumped on other parts of the state.

New content today:

Intro to Intro to Machine Learning

Today I worked on a presentation for the university Data Engineering course I’ve been tutoring this semester. I felt there was a bit of a gap in the course material. The first few lectures talk about types of data, experimental collection of data, basic statistics (such as mean, standard deviation, etc), plotting and presenting data, and fitting data (linear regression), and hypothesis testing.

And then the next lecture is a guest lecturer from MathWorks who comes in and talks about using MATLAB to do machine learning. It’s a large jump in complexity and depth of material, and I feel like many of the students are left a bit floundering like they’ve suddenly been thrown in the deep end. There’s no set up of the context or motivation for machine learning, or what it’s actually trying to do with the data.

Last lecture I spoke with the professor about this and he agreed with my idea of adding a bit of introductory context material to set up the machine learning content. We actually have an opportunity to deliver this because for the next three weeks we just have project sessions where the students show up to work in their teams and ask us questions if they need any guidance. We do the same thing in the Image Processing course in semester two, and there we’ve had a “bonus material” lecture at the start of one of those session. (Last year I did this, talking about the science and engineering of photography.)

So today I made a short presentation (just 9 slides), that we can give to the students on Monday. I set up the problem that we want to solve – classifying things by examining measurements—data—about them. I give examples to show how general this problem is and the wide range of important applications. Then explain why it can be difficult and how we can approach it in a data analytical way. And then how we can apply automated algorithms to do it in various different ways. Which leads into the machine learning examples that they did in the aforementioned previous lecture.

I tested it on my wife and it only took about 15 minutes. (And she now has a better understanding of the context of machine learning than most people!)

Also today I started work on writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I hope to get that done in time to photograph Lego on Tuesday morning.

The forecast rain hit today – it was much cooler than yesterday. But still we managed to set a new record for number of consecutive days in Sydney with maximum temperature 20°C or more. Looking at the Bureau of Meteorology records, it looks like 193 consecutive days – the last day we had a maximum below 20°C was 17 October, 2022. The forecast for every day in the coming week is at least 22°C, so the streak will probably extend past 200 days.

New content today:

A survey of data engineering projects

Monday morning, 8am ethics class is the new schedule for winter. So I need to get up a little early and grab breakfast and get ready. We finished off the cloning topic, ready for Tuesday to start a new topic for the next week. Tomorrow morning I’ll need to write that lesson.

After lunch I walked Scully over to my wife’s work where she could mind her while I went in to the university for the first week of project work for the Data Engineering students. They have two weeks to write a project planning report, outlining what they intend to study and how, and then two further weeks to do the project and write a final report on the outcomes, as well as recording presentation videos. (All of which I have to mark…)

Today I walked around all the tables and asked each group what they planned to work on. It was a diverse range of project ideas. Some samples:

  • Looking at food prices in developing countries to see if they are affected/correlated with climate, economy, and other factors.
  • Examining agricultural output versus weather.
  • Checking for any effects on the consumer price index and other economic indicators of the COVID pandemic.
  • Collecting data on person and car movements at various times of the day and week in the vicinity of the university to determine any patterns.
  • Examining and comparing the image quality of difference phone cameras.
  • Studying the extent of glaciers over many years compared to weather records.
  • Determining if electricity consumption is affected by factors such as wind speed, temperatures, and building parameters such as height of building.
  • Characterising the popularity of video games on Steam versus time, looking at factors such as genre.
  • Modelling diabetes risk factor as a function of various demographic and health measurements.
  • Determining if the investment returns of US members of Congress outperforms stock market indices.
  • And the moon phase correlations one I mentioned last week.

So a really interesting range of projects!

For dinner tonight I made pizza. We got a new bag of bread flour in the groceries on Friday. Normally I get one brand, but it was out, so the supermarket replaced it in the online order with a different brand. It feels really different – finer and denser. And I think the pizza dough turned out a bit different, maybe a touch lighter, chewier, and crustier. I’m also making a new sourdough loaf tonight, so tomorrow morning when I bake it we’ll see if that is any different too.

New content today:

Board game design starting again

I slept in a bit this morning after yesterday’s busy day. But not too long, because I had a new class starting at 10am – another iteration of my 6-week course on Creative Thinking & Problem Solving: Let’s Design a Game. This time I have three students enrolled, which makes a nice change from the past two times I ran it, each with just one student.

Then I had three ethics classes this afternoon, so there wasn’t a lot of time to do much else. After lunch I washed the car – it needed it after yesterday’s road trip, and the fact that I hadn’t done it for a long while.

New content today:

Last teaching day for a week

Today I finished off the extended topic of Photography with my last groups of ethics students. This was the topic interrupted by a week off in the middle for me to recover from COVID. I’d planned to have a week off after this for the Easter break, so that will give me a bit more time to get over this lingering cough. It’s been tricky to do Zoom classes with kids without collapsing into coughing fits now and then.

I did a COVID test again this morning and it came up negative, so I could go into the university this afternoon for the next lecture of Data Engineering. Today was a guest lecture by a person from Mathworks, talking about how to use MatLab to do machine learning and deep learning for data analysis and classification. I find this a bit of a hard core turn from the more introductory level material of previous weeks, and I wonder how easy it is for the students who suddenly find themselves in the deep end of data analysis techniques.

For that course I also have a week off, since next Monday is the Easter Monday public holiday, and there are no lectures at the university. So I have a full week off from all teaching commitments! I should be able to relax a bit, and maybe get a head with some comics writing.

New content today:

Back into teaching and comics

Friday night was online board games night with friends, so I skipped my daily update. After missing last week’s face-to-face games due to COVID, it was nice to get together online and play some games.

My Friday was very busy. I had my first ethics classes since cancelling a week’s worth while I got over COVID. I had one at 9am, which I’d moved an hour earlier because at 10am I had a Standards Australia meeting (also via Zoom), to follow-up from the ISO Photography Standards meeting I attended in February. We had the usual administrative business, and I went through the technical report I wrote summarising the discussions and events of the international meeting. It went okay, although I had to pause a few times for coughing, which is still an issue as I recover from the illness.

At lunch I went to pick up a weekly grocery shop from the supermarket. And then in the afternoon I had three ethics classes in a row. I managed okay, but again, needing to pause to cough a few times. The cough is really quite annoying. It comes and goes throughout the day – sometimes I have a long period of coughing and feel awful, and then I it settles down a bit and doesn’t bother me for a while.

Today was similar, with the coughing fading in and out during the day. I went for a walk with my wife and Scully to the Naremburn bakery and had a cinnamon scroll for morning tea, which was really delicious. On the way home it rained, and became fairly heavy. We’d taken umbrellas, but forgotten Scully’s raincoat, so she got soaked, and when we got home we had to towel her off and give her a blow dry.

I spent much of today writing new comics for Irregular Webcomic! I’ve had two weeks of no new strips after the buffer rain out a couple of weeks ago, but now I’m planning to photograph this new batch tomorrow morning and have them ready for Monday.

I made Thai red curry vegetables and rice for dinner tonight – which is the first proper dinner for both of us that we’ve had for some time, as my wife hasn’t felt up to eating much since she got COVID as well, but she’s feeling better now.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Data presentation for beginners

Monday, and the weather was a lot cooler, with a few showers. I had three ethics classes, and then had to head off to the university for this weeks’s Data Engineering lecture. This is one of my favourites in the course, as it’s a lecture I designed about data presentation. It goes into formatting tables, and producing graphs, in ways that are clear and informative, without being confusing or deceptive. It sounds simple, but there’s quite a lot of subtlety to the topic, and the presentation plus the illustrative tutorial exercises for the students to complete fills up over 2.5 hours.

Afterwards I headed home and had to decide to either quickly make a new Irregular Webcomic! strip for tonight, or to abandon the week and just do reruns this week. I ran out of buffer last week and haven’t had time to make a new batch of comics. I decided not to stress myself out, and to give myself a break and hopefully I’ll have time to make a full batch by next Monday.

I made sure I didn’t repeat last week’s mistake and end up not having lunch until 2pm, but having my lunch during a break at at 11:30, before my final ethics class at midday. This meant I wanted a snack during the university lecture, so I grabbed a pack of choc-mint biscuits from the supermarket before I went in. Mmmm….

New content today: