Posts
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May 4, 2015
Code on cake, poker and a number theory classification web app
I have just finished writing feedback and obtaining marks for my first year students’ presentations. These presentations follow 11 weeks during which students formed companies and worked together to come up with a ‘product’ which had to involve mathematics and code (this semester comes just after 11 weeks of learning Python and Sage). In this post I’ll briefly describe some of the great things that the students came up with.
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Apr 6, 2015
My 5 reasons why jekyll + github is a terrible teaching tool.
For the past year or so I have been using jekyll for all my courses. If you do not know, in a nutshell, jekyll is a ruby framework that lets you write templates for pages and build nice websites using static markdown files for your content. Here I will describe what I think of jekyll from a pedagogic point of view, in 5 main points.
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Mar 25, 2015
A one week flipped learning environment to introduce Object Oriented Programming
This post describes a teaching activity that is run for the Cardiff MSc. programmes. The activity is revolves around a two day hackathon that gets students to use Python and object oriented programming to solve a challenge. The activity is placed within a flipped learning environment and makes use of what I feel is a very nice form of assessment (we just get to know the students).
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Mar 24, 2015
Marrying toys and students
In class yesterday we took a look at matching games. These are sometimes referred to as stable marriage problems. To have some data for us to play with I asked for some volunteers to marry. Sadly I apparently am not allowed to ask students to rank each other in class and I also do not have the authority to marry. So, like last year I used some of my office toys and asked students to rank them.
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Mar 23, 2015
Cooperative basketball in class
Today in class we repeated the game we played last year. 3 teams of 3 students took part this year and here is a photo of the aftermath:
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