Tag: teaching

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.

New content today:

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.

New content today:

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.

New content today:

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?

New content today:

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: