Posts tagged #education

University of Michigan Robotics Department. Michigan Robotics has 15 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

In higher education, AI should be a human-centered tool inside a curriculum that expects more from students, not less.

I came across this fascinating paper documenting seven years of experience building and refining an undergraduate robotics course within a Computer Science curriculum, and it's packed with hard-won practical wisdom. Starting back in 2016, the author R. Pito Salas chronicles the full arc of the program's evolution — from initial goals and platform choices to the inevitable dead-ends and course corrections along the way. What I find most valuable here is the candid, longitudinal perspective: rather than presenting a polished snapshot of a program that already works, this paper honestly reflects on what changed and why. Key lesson...

An opinionated perspective on how to do important research that makes a difference (and sometimes win awards).

You know I've been using Claude Code and friends extensively in my work. To the extent that most of the python that I generated in the last month was written by Claude Code. You might know that up to recently I was teaching at Brandeis University in the Computer Science department. While teaching software engineering and robotics - and this is true of the whole department - we spent a fair amount of time teaching students "program". Either of the main topic of a course, or as an incidental part of whatever the course was about.

Students would learn through lectures, reading and practice how to write relatively complicated programs in a variety of languages. But the practice, usually was to ...

Continuing a theme of the previous blog, I am starting to really believe that programming, coding, software development is going to be forever changed. I say this, among other things, from the perspective of someone who has taught software engineering, development, and intro programming courses.

I have been doing more and more programming using AI tools. In my case, Claude Code in particular. But I think they are all similar and converging. From time to time, the leader switches around. But really, that is kind of meaningless because it is very unclear what it means to be the leader. In other words, what is the metric by which we compare them? There are more or less an infinite number of us...

A 3-Question Checklist for Better Course Design Only when educators are clear on what students should gain by the end of the term can they design effective courses to get them there. Ask yourself these three simple questions when designing your next course to ensure it resonates with students.

How to think about the work

RoboGrok is a complete hands-on university-level robotics course covering forward and inverse kinematics (Denavit-Hartenberg), sensors, computer vision (machine vision), Artificial Intelligence, and motion control.

Seven years ago (2016), we began integrating Robotics into our Computer Science curriculum. This paper explores the mission, initial goals and objectives, specific choices we made along the way, and why and outcomes. Of course, we were not the first to do so. Our...

No course has ever been this engaging and effective in teaching hard-to-master STEM skills!

Educational robot with support for various drive kinematics - IDiAL-IMSL/Edurob

Get your own Petoi Bittle Robot Dog today! This open-source robot pet with advanced features is perfect for tech enthusiasts and pet lovers alike. Order now!

Makey Makey: An Invention Kit for Everyone. Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip to start inventing the future.

Discover Pepper the humanoid robot designed to interact with humans. Standing 120cm tall, Pepper can perceive his environment and speak 15 languages.

Train a computer to recognize your own images, sounds, & poses.
A fast, easy way to create machine learning models for your sites, apps, and more – no expertise or coding required.

Consensus is a search engine that uses AI to find answers in scientific research.

Robotics in Education (RiE) 2024 –

Build a multitasking operating system and kernel with an interactive shell!

Become a computer operating system and try not to anger the user!

NandGame – Build a computer from scratch. –An educational puzzle game. Solve a series of tasks where you build increasingly powerful components. Starts with the simplest logical components and ends up with a programmable computer.

Syllabi Policies for AI Generative Tools –Syllabi Policies for AI Generative Tools If you would like to submit your course guidelines/policy to be included here, please submit it in this form. Update: If you would like a more searchable version of this document, try out this spreadsheet that allows you to sort by Course, Discipline…

Learn something new on Wyzant.com! –With over 10 million hours of instruction provided since 2005, Wyzant.com is the nation’s largest marketplace for in-person…

Specifications Grading: A Method for Improving Student Performance –Last revised: 10/07/2021 by JP Overview Are you looking to increase student motivation and the quality of their academic work? If yes, consider specifications grading. According to Linda B. Nilson, Ph.D. the traditional higher education grading method is broken and specifications grading offers a solution with benefits for both students and faculty. Nilson published her…

Specifications grading with the EMRF rubric –A useful rubric for implementing specifications and other forms of mastery grading.

Opinion | I’m a Student. You Have No Idea How Much We’re Using ChatGPT. –

The XRP Robotics Platform is a hands-on, comprehensive robotics platform and includes everything needed to build and program a beginner to advanced robot.

Are Your Students Ready for AI? –To thrive in a world that now includes generative AI tools like ChatGPT, students need to develop five essential skills, says professor Oguz A. Acar. Use this four-step framework to empower your students and equip them for success in the digital age.

What is Standards-based Grading? – TeacherEase –

A stop/start/continue for the ungrading community –

Opinion | How Shoddy Data Becomes Sensational Research –Academics are addicted to p-hacking, data torturing, and other statistical sins. We must break these habits.

Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!

CheatGPT –If you teach programming, this is a very insightful article. It doesnt solve anything though. From the author: “This week I stepped out of one world and landed in another. It started while I was marking assignments in a few of my programming courses.The quality of the code I was reading was amazing! My students were doing the sorts of things that my open source peers do.”

10 Ways to Avoid Being Fooled –Great useful list of mental models, biases, techniques and tips to avoid being fooled

One of many simple CPU simulators. I'm teaching a course in Operating Systems and I've been looking for a really simple and clear visual simulator for a CPU. This one is the best one yet. But I would like a better one. This one is missing any kind of support for IO or System calls or something like that. But it's usable.

The stats gap –Students understand just enough statistics to get by

Several million people employ electronic mail for some significant portion of their professional communications. Yet in my experience few people have figured out how to use the net productively. A great deal of effort is going into technical means for finding information on the net, but hardly anybody has been helping newcomers figure out where the net fits in the larger picture of their own careers. These notes are a first attempt to fill that gap, building on the most successful practices I've observed in my twenty years on the net. I will focus on the use of electronic communication in research communities, but the underlying principles will be applicable to many other communities as well.

Forget about algorithms and models — learn how to solve problems first –An interesting article, stating the obvious. This is highly relevant to someone who teaches college students their in their very first year of learning programming. And yet it is still a subject of debate among my colleagues. Heres the authors’s own words: “t’s not necessarily about what programming language you learn or use. It’s about how you approach problem solving.”

Our new web site for the Robotics Lab. Finally after 5 years I found the time and the help to build a half decent web site

Robotics Lab @ Brandeis –Our new web site for the Robotics Lab. Finally after 5 years I found the time and the help to build a half decent web site

Discover the best public Google docs

Math for Future Scientists: Require Statistics, Not Calculus –I totally agree with this. Ive used or needed to use statistics ans probability a lot more often than calculus: “The case for ending calculus requirements for science majors.”

A suprisingly thoughtful and detailed essay. I skimmed it. It's a bit of intellectual play because the question could be answered much more briefly. But the article does go deep and look at the question in many different interesting ways.

Everything you need to know –A quirky guide for people joining this particular HCI research lab: “This material should take you a week to go through. It’ll help you in doing HCI work and research in general. 1) Start with a talk by Richard Hamming called You and Your Research about picking research problems: https://ift.tt/2qemNPJ then look over…

Makesigns is a scientific poster printing company with a focus on a simple ordering process and unbeatable customer service. We also offer free templates and tutorials to help you make your research poster.

Poster printing services and pricing guide.

Pmarchive · Pmarca Guide to Career Planning: Skills and education –Marc Andreeson is a somewhat legendry technologist. His advice may not fit you, but it is still worth listeneing to: “Some people argue that college will be your one chance in life to pursue your passion—to spend four years doing nothing but studying whatever you love the most, whether that’s Renaissance literature or existential philosophy.

I disagree.”

Marc Andreeson is a somewhat legendry technologist. His advice may not fit you, but it is still worth listeneing to: "Some people argue that college will be your one chance in life to pursue your passion—to spend four years doing nothing but studying whatever you love the most, whether that’s Renaissance literature or existential philosophy.

I disagree."

This handbook is for grad students, postdocs and PIs who do a lot of programming as part of their research. It will teach you, in a practical manner, how to organize your code so that it is easy to...

To Thread or Not to Thread: An In-Depth Look at Ruby’s Execution Models An in-depth look at threads vs processes in Ruby web applications, and when you should use each. June 2, 2022 at 07:16PM

Great list of top publications

Engineering & Computer Science – Google Scholar Metrics Great list of top publications April 14, 2022 at 10:28PM

Success Through Presentations – 5 Minutes with Cyrill Success through presenting well

Series: 5 Minutes with Cyrill

Cyrill Stachniss, 2022 Credits:

Video by Cyrill Stachniss

Thanks for image courtesy to Andres Milioto, Olga Vysotska, Michelle Watt, William Moreland, Luis Quintero

Intro music by The Brothers Records

April 4, 2022 at 02:54PM

Pose estimation is of great importance in many computer vision applications: robot navigation, augmented reality, and many more. This process is based on finding correspondences between points in the real environment and their 2d image projection. This is usually a difficult step, and thus it is common to use synthetic or fiducial markers to make it easier.

Computer Vision, Deep Learning, and OpenCV courses from PyImageSearch and Dr. Adrian Rosebrock

PyImageSearch University Courses: You can master Computer Vision, Deep Learning, and OpenCV Computer Vision, Deep Learning, and OpenCV courses from PyImageSearch and Dr. Adrian Rosebrock March 18, 2022 at 02:24PM

OpenCV: Detection of ArUco Markers Pose estimation is of great importance in many computer vision applications: robot navigation, augmented reality, and many more. This process is based on finding correspondences between points in the real environment and their 2d image projection. This is usually a difficult step, and thus it is common to use synthetic or fiducial markers to make it easier. March 18, 2022 at 02:24PM

We present YOLO, a new approach to object detection. Prior work on object
detection repurposes classifiers to perform detection. Instead, we frame object
detection as a regression problem to...

You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection We present YOLO, a new approach to object detection. Prior work on object

detection repurposes classifiers to perform detection. Instead, we frame object

detection as a regression problem to… March 14, 2022 at 01:31AM

MiniTest – Writing Test Code In Ruby (2/3) p.s. This is a series of articles and each article builds off another. I suggest starting at Part 1…. March 4, 2022 at 02:54PM

Testing network services in Ruby is easier than you think You’ve started a new project and it’s time for your code to depend on a third-party service. It could be something like ElasticSearch, Resque, a billing provider, or just an arbitrary HTTP API. You’re a good developer, so you want this code to be well tested. But how do you test code that fires off requests to a service that’s totally out of your control? March 4, 2022 at 02:53PM

The 3 Tenets of Service Objects in Ruby on Rails | HackerNoon

March 4, 2022 at 02:55PM

It’s not always easy to draw out meaningful dialogue from online participants—whether in a classroom or office setting. These eight tactics can help educators and managers alike get responses from even the most mute-happy meeting members.

How to Encourage Students to Speak Up in Virtual Classes It’s not always easy to draw out meaningful dialogue from online participants—whether in a classroom or office setting. These eight tactics can help educators and managers alike get responses from even the most mute-happy meeting members. February 4, 2022 at 11:02PM

RoboGrok is a complete hands-on university-level robotics course covering forward and inverse kinematics (Denavit-Hartenberg), sensors, computer vision (machine vision), Artificial Intelligence, and motion control.

RoboGrok University-Level Robotics Course and Parts Kit RoboGrok is a complete hands-on university-level robotics course covering forward and inverse kinematics (Denavit-Hartenberg), sensors, computer vision (machine vision), Artificial Intelligence, and motion control. February 3, 2022 at 01:44PM

Code switches at Flickr

Heroku Postgres | Heroku Dev Center The Heroku Postgres add-on is a production database service, offering PostgreSQL, read-only follower databases, snapshots for forks, and local client access. February 1, 2022 at 10:21PM

Free Online Robotics Courses for 2022 – Asian Robotics Review

February 1, 2022 at 02:28PM

Flipping Out | code.flickr.com Code switches at Flickr February 1, 2022 at 10:12PM

Aho/Ullman Foundations of Computer Science This book has been taken out of print by W. H. Freeman. You are welcome to use it if you like. We believed in 1992 it was the way to introduce theory in Computer Science, and we believe that today. January 28, 2022 at 03:29PM

Remote Teaching: Synchronous vs. Asynchronous | Center for Teaching and Learning | Worcester State University There are two options for instructors to facilitate class sessions remotely: Synchronous or Asynchronous. January 25, 2022 at 05:14PM

Adding depth sensors onto the machine allows it to “see” its environment

This robot can hike as fast as a human Adding depth sensors onto the machine allows it to “see” its environment January 22, 2022 at 02:43PM

The Anatomy of a GraphQL Query – Apollo GraphQL Blog

January 12, 2022 at 04:42PM

So what’s this GraphQL thing I keep hearing about? by Sacha Greif So what’s this GraphQL thing I keep hearing about?If you’re like me, you probably go through three stages when hearing about a new technology: 1. DismissalOne more JavaScript library?! Just use jQuery already!2. InterestHmm, maybe I should check out this new library I January 12, 2022 at 04:41PM

Types of cloud computing

January 12, 2022 at 05:08PM

Runbook: A Ruby DSL for Gradual System Automation At Braintree, we like to write tools to automate our work. Our latest tool is Runbook, a Ruby DSL for gradually automating system… January 12, 2022 at 06:04PM

An instrumental intro to GraphQL with Ruby | AppSignal Blog We’ll learn about GraphQL by making an application about music January 12, 2022 at 04:41PM

10 BEST Performance Testing Tools | Load Testing Tools (2022) Performance Testing Tools help in the process of determining the speed, effectiveness, reliability, scalability and interoperability of the system, computer, network, program or application. January 12, 2022 at 04:33PM

Flexible campus technology solutions to boost agility & efficiency, enabling deeper engagement, smarter insights & better outcomes for your institution.

Unifying Campus Technology Solutions to Power Higher Ed | Ellucian Flexible campus technology solutions to boost agility & efficiency, enabling deeper engagement, smarter insights & better outcomes for your institution. January 6, 2022 at 07:28PM

RoboGrok University-Level Robotics 1 Course

January 3, 2022 at 04:42PM

Can I Let One Kid Play Violent Video Games and Not the Other? — The Information

December 21, 2021 at 04:39PM

Our team of educators and scientists has reviewed and organized the best free teaching resources for K-12 through college. Go Entire Collection Activities Videos Visualizations Featured Resource Living Landscapes: ...

The goal is not to introduce Climate Education as a standalone topic, but to integrate it with the core curriculum of Science, Mathematics and Social Sciences.

Climate Change Education Across the Curricula, Across the Globe The goal is not to introduce Climate Education as a standalone topic, but to integrate it with the core curriculum of Science, Mathematics and Social Sciences. December 3, 2021 at 07:46PM

CLEAN Our team of educators and scientists has reviewed and organized the best free teaching resources for K-12 through college. Go Entire Collection Activities Videos Visualizations Featured Resource Living Landscapes: … December 3, 2021 at 07:46PM

Civitas Learning | Student Success Platform & Services – Civitas Learning We equip higher ed with actionable insights, connected workflow, and services to improve enrollment, course success, persistence and graduation. October 8, 2021 at 06:10PM

Enter names, spin wheel to pick a random winner. Customize look and feel, save and share wheels.

Wheel of Names Enter names, spin wheel to pick a random winner. Customize look and feel, save and share wheels. August 22, 2021 at 08:47PM

Program Robots Like a Boss. Lots of good robotics resources

The Robotics Back-End – Program Robots Like a Boss Program Robots Like a Boss. Lots of good robotics resources June 20, 2021 at 12:23AM

This is Grammar For Robots. What? Why? 🤖 https://lambdalabs.com/papers📝 The paper “RoboGrammar: Graph Grammar for Terrain-Optimized Robot designer. Very intersting paper ! June 12, 2021 at 07:58PM

A Wiki website of Calls For Papers (CFP) of international conferences, workshops, meetings, seminars, events, journals and book chapters in computer science, communications, software engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning, networking, signal processing, systems etc.

University-level, short video lessons and full online courses to help you understand and prepare for this technology of the future.

This is a famous course written by a really cool quirky Ruby celebrity (known as _why -- the underscore is part of the name). You might find it useful!

Codeschool courses are supposed to be excellent. This is another resource that is available if you want to accelerate your learning even more!

Difficult and long article

Very nice list of idioms

Useful info about how to authenticate from Rails to Google

something between wikipedia and what.com

Great set of online coding tools

Another set of tutorials

Free research on art history

Cool tool to lookup quotes

Philosophy, literature, ideas, criticism, history, art, music from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Opening the curricular black box

Advanced photogrammetry software that uses images to create professional orthomosaics, point clouds, models and more.

With Piazza, easily answer questions, manage course materials, and track student participation. It'll save you time, and your students will love using it. It's free, and easy to get started.

With Piazza, easily answer questions, manage course materials, and track student participation. It'll save you time, and your students will love using it. It's free, and easy to get started.

Course notes and curriculum for Spring 2012 FBE: The Technology Startup

Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done. Zoom is a publicly traded company headquartered in San Jose, CA.

Semantic Scholar uses groundbreaking AI and engineering to understand the semantics of scientific literature to help Scholars discover relevant research.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.

Shop W.B. Mason for all your office supply, ink and toner, furniture, technology, break room, and janitorial needs. Amazingly low prices. Personalized Service. Lightning fast business and residential delivery.

Build a launch site in minutes to capture early users

Invest as little as $100 in startups and small businesses. Wefunder is the largest Regulation Crowdfunding portal.

Fun list of papers, reports, and dissertations related to ruby from academia.

Cool web site about computer science papers

InterSystems perspectives on being a researcher and scientist

This site shows off research papers which include the code to run. Very nice!

Amazing little version of the robot that was sent to mars, "easy" to 3d print!

Heroku and Github free offers

Quite good explanation of thread safety in Ruby apps

"The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades."

There’s so much debate about this. This article has helpful practical advice m

Robotics Course that looks great

Self-driving cars are transformational technology, on the cutting-edge of robotics, machine learning, and engineering. Learn online with Udacity.

The Lesson to Unlearn

“The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn’t something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.”

tags: school grades paulgraham

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Podcast: Can Machine Learning Solve the Challenges of Cloud Computing? | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) | Brandeis University

Good introduction to Cloud Computing and Machine Learning

tags: elasticity scalability machinelearning

jhspetersson/fselect

Another crazy useful tool for programmers.

tags: utilities ...

Teaching Robotics With ROS | The Construct

Really good article about a way to teach robotics and pros

tags: robotics teaching ROS

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The most-read article in the history of [The New Republic] is not about war, politics, or great works of art. It’s about the admissions policies of a handful of elite universities, most prominently my employer, Harvard, which is figuratively and literally immolated on the cover.

It’s not surprising that William Deresiewicz’s “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League” has touched a nerve. Admission to the Ivies is increasingly seen as the bottleneck to a pipeline that feeds a trickle of young adults into the remaining lucrative sectors of our financialized, winner-take-all economy. And their c...

This is worth looking at: I’ve always said no, effort shouldn’t count. When students pleaded, “but I worked so hard,” or “I studied so long,” I would respond with the clichéd quip about people with brain tumors not wanting surgeons who try hard. Link: Should Effort Count?

How to Get a Job at Google – NYTimes.com:

Don’t get him wrong, Bock begins, “Good grades certainly don’t hurt.” Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more.

Unfortunately students can be quite focused on their grades, and as a result I end up paying more attention to grading than I would like. By the way let me point out that ‘grading’ is more than assigning a grade to a bit of homework. Without going into detail, you have to decide and communicate:

What all the gradable items of work are (e.g. a programming assignment, a reading assignment, a test, a presentation, a mockup or prototype, etc. etc.) Your logical scheme for assigning a grade to a work item. That is, what is an “A” for a programming assignment? For a particular presentation, etc.) What the relative weighting is of each grade is What formula you use to convert all the individual wo...

This article is a bit harsh/one-sided, but I still thought it was interesting to see an attempt at comparing programming as practiced in two very different contexts.

What’s the difference between college-level and corporate programming? | Ars Technica:

Programming in school and programming in the real world are so inherently different to the point where there’s actually very little overlap. CS will prepare you for “real world” software development like athletics training would prepare an army for battle.

In a vaguely related article, think about this: In the moder...

I stumbled across this article while waiting for a meeting to start. It is a bit “inside baseball”, in this case “inside brandeis” but it was revealing to me at least. Students can “shop” for courses for the first two weeks of the term, attending classes and adding and dropping at will during that time as they settle for their choices. I guess when I went to college they had that too, but I wasn’t aware of how it worked, so I never did it.

It makes for odd dynamics in the class room as for the first two weeks you don’t really know who to expect to see, who will show up next time, and whether they are keeping up or not. This writer does not seem to be enjoying his college experience as much ...

Harvard Business School Case Study – Gender Equity – NYTimes.com:

The administrators and the class of 2013 were parting ways, their experiment continuing. The deans vowed to carry on but could not say how aggressively: whether they were willing to revise the tenure process to attract more female contenders, or allow only firms that hired and promoted female candidates to recruit on campus. “We made progress on the first-level things, but what it’s permitting us to do is see, holy cow, how deep-seated the rest of this is,” Ms. Frei said.

I stumbled across this web site. I can’t say anything about their status or quality but I was suprised that someone developed what looks like a complete “university admin in a box” cloud based software. Maybe I can use it for Bootup Academy!

Get a Feature tour of Fedena – Management Information System:

Fedena provides user-friendly dashboards with login access to all the teachers, non-teaching staff, students, parents and management body of your institution. The various modules available in Fedena takes care of all the processes in your institution, right from admission of new students to generating transfer certificate, when the student completes the studies.

If you are anything like me, this is something you’ve try to articulate. Here’s a great article on that arcane topic!

What is algebra? | profkeithdevlin:

Is mastery of algebra (i.e., algebraic thinking) worth the effort? You bet — though you’d be hard pressed to reach that conclusion based on what you will find in most school algebra textbooks. In today’s world, most of us really do need to master algebraic thinking. In particular, you need to use algebraic thinking if you want to write a macro to calculate the cells in a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel. This one example alone makes it clear why algebra, and not arithmetic, should ...

Master’s Degree Is New Frontier of Study Online – NYTimes.com:

Next January, the Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a master’s degree in computer science through massive open online courses for a fraction of the on-campus cost, a first for an elite institution. If it even approaches its goal of drawing thousands of students, it could signal a change to the landscape of higher education.

I don’t agree that it’s a “major problem for computer science” – by a long shot. But still it is odd that often Computer Science students are not exposed to ‘modern’ source control management systems or version management systems, or maybe even “any” SCM at all.

Version Control and Higher Education — What I Learned Building… — Medium:

We are not doing students any favors by ignoring software like Git at the university level. It’s a major problem for computer science, information technology and design students to not—at the very least—be exposed to some form of version control or source code management during their tenure at school.

Kirk McDonald: Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won’t Hire You – WSJ.com:

According to one recent report, in the next decade American colleges will mint 40,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, though the U.S. economy is slated to create 120,000 computing jobs that require such degrees.

Now, I don’t know where this gentleman, Kirk McDonald got this statistic but if you are teaching computer science then it’s a pretty sobering statistic. I am going to try digging deeper to see if I can find the source.

What do you think, are younger people better programmers? Are they more productive, more clever, work longer hours? Or do older people have some advantages? Here’s a bit of research that says they do!

NC State News :: NC State News and Information » Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time:

There is a perception in some tech circles that older programmers aren’t able to keep pace with rapidly changing technology, and that they are discriminated against in the software field. But a new study from North Carolina State University indicates that the knowledge and skills of programmers actually improve over time – and that older programmers know as much (or more) than their younger peers when it comes to recent software platforms.

This trend is now unstoppable – massive open online courses – or MOOCs – are constantly in the news. The angle often seems to be about whether or how or how much they will impact higher education and education in general. It’s a topic I am very interested in.

Here’s another piece of the puzzle, this time from the New York Times. In this article a reporter signs up for ten different online courses in a quest to assess from his personal experience along these dimensions:

Professors: B+ Convenience: A Teacher to student interaction: D Student to student interaction:...

As you know the topic of the future of the university, the role of MOOCs, and online learning, is highly topical these days. I happen to be interested in it too so I refer you to this David Brooks Article, called, The Practical University. It’s an interesting angle.

However I want to pull a single quote out of that:

“Think about Sheryl Sandberg’s recent book, “Lean In.” Put aside the debate about the challenges facing women in society. Focus on the tasks she describes as being important for anybody who wan...

Control The Sun!

As you know, I am teaching a course at Olin College this spring – alas we are coming to the end. Anyway an important component has been a Lean Startup project, where students take invent a product and take it through a complete Lean Startup validation. Among many things that students do is to ‘go outside the building’ to validate their businesses.

Do me a great favor and help a team of students validate their idea,“Sunrise Blinds”, and answer this super easy questionnaire!

Tom Friedman, quoting Tony Wagner, describes what he thinks should be taught today (that isn’t really being taught:)

““Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to ta...

I don’t know if I mentioned that I’m teaching Engineering Entrepreneurship at Olin. What a cool school! While the two course have existed at Olin, I was asked to re-invent them so to a great extent they are new.

Here’s a blurb that appeared in the ...

I am (after 10 years) a beginner pianist who wants to improve. I practice, but not diligently enough. On average I think I practice 5 days a week, for about 1/2 hour, so that’s less than 3 hours a week. Clearly I could do better. But I am proud of the effort I put in and I definitely have made a lot of progress. But I am at best still an advanced beginner.

From an article,“If you’re busy, you’re doing something wrong”,

“We can start by disproving the assumption that the elite players dedicate ...

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU1xS07N-FA&w=560&h=315]

There are fascinating shifts going on in higher education today, from MOOCs to the ‘flipped classroom’. A lot of action. I think we are looking at another text-book “Innovator’s Dilemma” scenario playing out:

The established players (traditional universities), aware of a new way of delivering their offer, but seeing that it doesn’t meet the needs of their customer’s as well as the old way. And the upstarts (udemy and others), the disruptors, applying and refining the use of the technology in niche markets, eventually perfecting it to the point that they can blow by the laggards, and leave them in the dust. Textbook!

Check out today’s New York Times:

“Institutions of higher learning must m...

Well these stories appear from time to time, either saying it’s good or bad for you. What’s an addict to do?

“Coffee isn’t just warm and energizing, it may also be extremely good for you. In recent years, scientists have studied the effects of coffee on various aspects of health and their results have been nothing short of amazing.” (from Lifehacker)

I am a really big fan of the book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. So much so that I am using it as a “textbook” for the Entrepreneurship course I am teaching at Olin College.

Oddly enough, I couldn’t find the word “market” in the index.

I was surfing around preparing for my class and happened to look at this page on the Harvard Business School web site. The page is called “Entrepreneurs” and it says, among other things:

“A video archive that captures insights from learning members of the School’s entrepreneurial community. Entrepreneurs speak on a common set of themes including their development as entrepreneurs, strategies for identifying opportunity, and leadership. (from Harvard Business School)

Notice anything?

[](http://www...

I’m excited to tell you that I just accepted a position as Visiting Lecturer at Olin College for Spring 2013! Actually the full name is Olin College of Engineering.

Olin is a small engineering college, actually in the top ten of engineering colleges according to US News’ Rankings. ...

One of the tensions that I have seen in teaching software engineering is whether something should be viewed as legitimate research or part of the craft of computer engineering.

It’s a slippery slope that I myself didn’t have a good articulation for.

I came across this in a newsgroup which I think is a pretty good description. The writer is referring to Researching Information Systems and Computing...

An interesting fact:

“In the last years of the nineteenth century, Charles Dow created an index of 12 leading industrial companies. Almost none of them exist today….[…]… Four years after Dow invented his average, a group of 14 leading research institutions created the Association of American Universities. All of them exist today.” (fromThe Higher Education Monopoly is Crumbling As We Speak)

The article goes on to talk about where Higher Ed’s staying power has come from:

“I think that rule is going to change, and soon. Many factors explain the endurance of higher education institutions—the ascen...

As you may know, I’ve been working on launching Bootup Academy, which will offer applied computer science or engineering programs to college students who want to supplement their studies with an intensive 10 week summer program. That’s why you may have seen more posts here labeled [EDUCATION].

We’re now adding an additional focus, Booting Up experienced technical folks who have never put together a web or mobile application, have not worked in an agile environment, and so may not have the right check boxes on their resume.

We think they may be interested in rapidly bring themselves up to speed, develop skills, knowledge, contacts, and importantly, a por...

I would love to see this trend accelerate:

“The five-year-old [Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship] program, [Wake Forest University’s] most popular minor, requires students to learn the practical aspects of starting a business. It is a sign of change in liberal-arts colleges, which are grappling with the responsibility of preparing students for a tight and rapidly shifting job market while still providing the staples of academic inquiry.” (from ...

The other day I referenced an article questioning the motivation and effectiveness of large scale strategic planning exercises in universities today.

In this vein I was interested to see this article describing how certain organizations have totally thrown open the process of developing and communicating strategy by employing some good old crowd sourcing.

“In 2009, Wikimedia1 launched a special wiki—one dedicated to the organization’s own strategy. Over the next two years, more than 1,000 vol...

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about social networks in preparation for the 2012 edition of my Brandeis University Course, “Web and Social Applications“. This morning I was preparing lecture notes for “Current Issues In Social Networks”. Here are some good current links I have been able to find:

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? Social Media’s Small Positive Role in Human Relationships ...

I came across a very provocative article about why and how universities seem to often get buried in a time consuming and torturous process of strategic planning.

My experience in the private sector is that it is very easy to get sucked into a process that takes on a life of its own and sucks a massive amount of time out of the organization for very questionable outcomes.

Caveat: I don’t claim that I have a broad view on this, as my experience is quite limited but I’ll just say that for my money “Strategic Plans” are the management equivalent of “Big Design Up Front”, both of which I try to limit as much as possi...

An interesting article by David Brooks in the New York Times commenting on the views of the always controversial Peter Thiel.

[Why is he controversial? Because he has a grant program for students who are so passionate about their startup idea that they are willing to drop out of college to get the grant. Which is ironic because in the article, Brooks is citing what Thiel is teaching in his Stanford COURSE!]

The article is about Thiel’s views on what and how students get taught in college:

“First, students have to jump through ever-more de...

A provocatively titled article (Why Youth Has an Advantage In Innovation) argues that to innovate you have to be an omnivorous and promiscuous consumer of new stuff. Try this list on for size, does it fit?

When a new device or operating system comes out do you rush out to get it as soon as possible – just because you want to play with the new features? Or do you wait for the dust to settle so that you don’t make a mistaken purchase. Or because you don’t want to waste your time. Do you use LinkedIn for all of your recruiting, or do you mistakenly think that LinkedIn is o...

I saw this article in the Sunday New York Timestoday which starts promising but then becomes a bit ridiculous and makes a mockery of serious research, in my humble opinion.

It starts with a claim that sounds plausible:

“Recent advances in understanding what psychologists call “embodied cognition” indicate a surprisingly direct link between mind and body. It turns out that people draw on their bodily experiences in constructing their social reality....

Should it be ok for students to take notes during a class and turn them into a marketable product that they make money on?

If I am teaching the same class again this year, students could buy the course notes and potentially do better, or learn more. That’s a good thing, right?

However is it fair to me? After all these students are becoming multi-millionaires by reselling my work, my intellectual property. Yeah right.

One professor has an amusing solution to this dilemma, but I think it still misses the point;

Precisely. Besides which, I’ve figured out a much more fun solution to the problem: I’m going to buy some of these note sets and outlines being sold for my classes. ...

Here’s an interesting article in “The Opinionator” of the New York Times about blogging, scholarly writing and the tension between the two. He says:

“… The digital humanities, it is claimed, can help alter that “monstrous terrain” in at least two ways. The first is to open up the conversation to the public whose support the traditional humanities has lost. If anyone and everyone can join in, if the invitation of open access is widely accepted, appreciation of what humanists do will grow beyond the confines of the university. Familiarity will breed not contempt, but fellowship. â€...

David Colletta shared this link in comments to my recent post about team work. David’s link was good enough that I thought I should excerpt it to increase the chances that my colleagues and students at Brandeis see it.

Here’s an excerpt from it:

“However, the most rewarding experiences I had were when I was actively collaborating with others on the H-Store and Relational Cloud projects. We achieved more than I could have by myself, I learned more than I would have by myself, and most importantly: it is more fun to work with others. You have people to commiserate with when papers get rejected, ...

I’ve had occasion as you know to teach a few times at Brandeis University. The courses were in Web Development, Mobile Development and Game Development. A major component was a Product Incubator where students worked in teams to develop a product. The organizational and logistical questions as well as the dynamics around team work were significant and challenging.

In my mind the overall benefit of team student projects are:

students must show mastery of the material to do well it is more fun and rewarding for the students team work is a fundamental aspect of whatever they will do in the future the teachers are around to help ste...

This article gives a fascinating perspective on the disconnect between what they teach in law school and what knowledge is required to actually be an effective lawyer. Some great facts from the article:

“Last year, a survey by American Lawyer found that 47 percent of law firms had a client say, in effect, “We don’t want to see the names of first- or second-year associates on our bills.” Other clients are demanding that law firms charge flat fees.”

…and …

““Law school has a kind of intellectual inferiority complex, and it’s built into the idea of law school itself,” says W. Bradley Wendel of ...

If you haven’t heard about Khan Academy, let me be the first one to introduce you to its wonders. There is a huge library of 10-12 minute educational videos on high-school and college level topics from matrix math to trigonometry to how mortgages work. You need to read the background, it’s an unbelievably prolific individual guy, Kahn, who records each one of these. From what he says, he’s not an expert in all of them, he just ‘bones up’ on the topic and then records the session. The quality of the teaching is really amazing.

Case in point. A few weeks ago I had to recall how and why ...

If you watched (or didn’t) the preceding video by Jesse Schellyou might have caught one throw away idea mentioned that really intrigued me: Eliminate grades and instead adopt a system modeled more like experience points in a game. The idea he mentions I believe came from a Professor Lee Sheldon. Here’s the link to his course, Gaming the Classroom.

In my teaching at Brandeis, deciding how to handle grading is one of the trickier problems* to solve. While my experience teaching so far is quite limited I ...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what kind of preparation college students need as they graduate to pursue their futures. Thomas Friedman writes an excellent column in the New York Times where he says:

“Look at the news these days from the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy — Silicon Valley. Facebook is now valued near $100 billion, Twitter at $8 billion, Groupon at $30 billion, Zynga at $20 billion and LinkedIn at $8 billion. These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world, and here’s what’s scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. ...

Fun article about Ben Hescott who has some unique – and impressive – approaches to teaching an abstract topic:

Q. Did you experience an “aha’’ teaching moment?

A. My first time teaching, I was using PowerPoint slides. One student kept saying, “I don’t see it.’’ So I turned off the computer, grabbed a piece of chalk, and went through the material slowly on the blackboard, without notes. Afterward, the kid said, “You’re a really good teacher when you’re not using PowerPoint.’’ That changed everything.” (from The Boston Globe)

You have to read the whole interview!

I recently saw the movie “Waiting for Superman” – yes I am late to the party. But in case you have not seen it let me recommend it to you as a highly revealing and disappointing view into the way the American school system runs, stuck in a system that feels so wrong in so many ways. Watch it. And visit the Waiting For Superman Web Site.

Here is the IMdb info for Waiting for Superman. Here is theNetflix link for the DVD.

I am about a week from beginning teaching my course at Brandeis University. The curriculum is a little different from last year, focusing on mobile software engineering and game development. This is different from last year, where we focused both on web and mobile software engineering.

The structure is that we teach during june and july, 4 days a week, and the students end up with 3 courses worth of credits. The students are both graduate and undergraduate. Given the time frame you can see that it’s an intensive boot camp-like experience. It’s a lot of work and a lot of fun.

So with my mind on teaching, curriculum, homework assignments and grading, I made note of...

Last year when teaching REST concepts at Brandeis University I proved the truism that there’s no better way to learn about something than to try and teach it. We (all) wrapped ourselves around the axle trying to understand HTTP “PUT” versus HTTP “POST” and learned new english words like Idempotency. I won’t go into the whole story because it’s kind of long.

* But one of the keys ideas that is tricky to understand is the difference between PUT and POST in REST as it is implemented using HTTP. PUT replaces a specific resource (think of it as a record for a specific key) while POST creates a new resource. *

So I was interested to see that there’...

If I could fool you into believing that a fake rubber hand that you were looking at was really your own hand, how would you react if I took a knife to it? Weird questions that Neuro-science researchers busy themselves with, but really fairly amazing. Here’s an article in Scientific American about the study:

“A knife-wielding researcher is bearing down on your right hand—or is it your hand? You see three arms in front of you, and you can feel your palms dampen with fear-induced perspiration. But is it your right hand the kitchen knife is plunging toward, or a false, rubber right hand?” (from Scientific American)

An insightful article about higher education in the USA: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. Here are some interesting quotes. It’s a long article and all of it was quite interesting.

“Students at places like Cleveland State also don’t get A-’s just for doing the work. There’s been a lot of handwringing lately over grade inflation, and it is a scandal, but the most scandalous thing about it is how uneven it’s been.

Forty years ago, the average GPA at both public and private universities was about 2.6, still close to the traditional B-/C+ curve. Since then, it’s gone up everywhere, but not by anything l...

I just came across an excellent speech given by William Deresiewics (I didn’t know who he was either) to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point. The title of the speech is Solitude and Leadership.

I had a hard time finding a representative quote from the article that would suck you in to reading it. This is a quote from the speech, where he is quoting the famous novel “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad:

He was commonplace in complexion, in features, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, w...

Check out this cool site developed by some Brandeis students who participated in the bootcamp-like course that I taught this summer. It’s called Definitious and it’s kind of a collaborative, semi-serious, semi-silly dictionary where anyone can define any word they want and others can vote the definitions up and down. Definitious. By the way, we are in already planning an expanded version of the course for this coming summer. It’s going to be even better!

If you know anyone in graduate school (oops, or if you are in graduate school yourself, or planning to go to one), this is interesting reading: Advice for New Graduate Students from Freedom to Tinker: [Ed Felten says: This is the time of year when professors offer advice to new students. My colleague Prof. Jennifer Rexford gave a great talk to a group of our incoming engineering Ph.D. students, about how to make the most of graduate school. Here’s what she said: ]

Those of you who know me, know that I collect quotations as a hobby. (The short version of the story is that I moved ...

I saw an article in the New York Times and other places about the future of the University, and even the End of the University. I have a bit of a curiosity about this topic as Lecturer at Brandeis University. Here’s a blog post from a Professor of Philsophy at Calvin College analyzing those articles and giving his own perspective, where he says: I’m very sympathetic to trying to move beyond the department-as-fortress model which currently dominates higher education, despite all of our talk of interdisciplinarity. While we might have a veneer of cross-discip...

Say what? I came across this paper; Mathematical Foundations of Consciousness. I generally love this stuff: Mathematics and writings on the nature of consciousness. When I saw this paper the title really intrigued me. Now my math is not strong enough to tackle anything like PhD level math (in fact my math knowledge beyond under graduate level is definitely uneven.) “The self-referential qualities of consciousness place it outside conventional logic(s) upon which scientific models and frameworks have heretofore been constructed. However more contemporary mathematical development has begun to deal with features of self-reference. We shall address Schrödinger’s...

The more businesses reward me for showing up at their establishments, the more likely it will be that a bad guy would want to pretend that they were there to garner those rewards. I came across a very interesting paper that proposes the notion of ‘location proofs.’: Enabling new mobile applications with location proofs)

From the paper: “Location is rapidly becoming the next “killer application” as location-enabled mobile handheld devices proliferate. One class of applications that has yet-to-emerge are those in which users have an incentive to lie about their location. These applications cannot rely solel...

Follow along as I develop the course: Brandeis University Web App Dev, Mobile App Dev and Incubator I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to co-teach 3 courses next year at Brandeis University. It’s something that I have wanted to do for a long time now and I am looking forward to it. As an experiment, I thought I would publish the course notes as I am developing them and perhaps get some feedback, suggestions or even volunteer guest speakers.

Here are the blurbs:

Web Application Development: *An introduction to web programming that covers t...

I spent 5 minutes perusing this site, and it looks really good. Wow, makes me want to be back in college. Now if only had time (and discipline?) to actually watch some of these lectures, that would be wonderful! Academic Earth – Thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars

A column in the NYTimes that offers a very different perspective from what we might think of as the goal of a liberal education: “Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.” (from What Life Asks of Us)

Sounds very common sense. I found myself nodding in agreement, feeling that this matched more or less how I saw things. But then he introduces a different view espoused in a book that came out last summer called ...

You might have heard of Nicholas Negroponte’s (Wikipedia bio – maybe better than the one he wrote himself!) project to create a so-called hundred dollar laptop. He spoke about it at the recent Pop!Tech conference, and the first prototype was unveiled last night. Andy Carvin got a chance to play with it and prepared this very interesting video documentary about it. Check it out.

Having someone in the family who applied to college (and got in) I really appreciate this article. Not to mention that I agree totally with the point of view.

I had the opportunity to be a guest lecturer at Brandeis University today, which was fun. Brandeis of course is my Alma Mater, so I was quite at home there. The course was about “Internet and Society” and the section was about Collaboration. Here are my slides, for those few who might be interested.