Computer Science Course in "Actually Useful Shock Horror"

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James came to see us today, which was rather nice. We got to talking and the subject turned to the gulf between studies and real life, and how to narrow it.

One of the things that we try to do in Hull is to tell people useful stuff that will they can use to get by in life as a developer. A problem that we have is that people think that the only use for the stuff that we are telling them is in exams and assignments to get a good mark.  This is a good thing as far as it goes. And of course you should do this. We have to do the grading thing to ensure that the learning outcomes for our courses have been met.

But we really, really want people to carry those skills into the next (and indeed every) thing that they do going forwards. We're trying to start you building skills that will carry you through your professional career. I don't think you can ever say you've learnt something like programming because, if you do it properly, you are continuously learning. And you should never stop. 

The good news for me is that we do get a few folks who go out into the big wide world, and come back and say "You know, that stuff you taught us turned out to be quite useful".

Who'd have thought?

Anyhoo, James is very keen to come back and do some Rather Useful Seminars on what you can do as a student to build on what you're taught, which is great.  Stay tuned. 

Photomatix Pro and the Mysterious Drive D:

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Tone mapping bananas....

Tone mapping bananas....

Sometimes I write blog posts to remind myself how to fix problems that I hit. In a couple of years I'll search for this problem and find this post. And then fix the problem again. 

It's happened before. 

I love Photomatix Pro. I use it to make my pictures a bit more interesting, and to create HDR shots. It works very well. Except that for the last week it's been crashing out when I try to save the image. Turns out to be my external plug-in memory card reader. If that is connected it gives what Photomatix thinks is a drive D: that doesn't actually exist. This does not end well, but if I unplug the reader it all just works. Yay. 

Novel Controllers at GDC

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For the past couple of days John has been at GDC showing off our Disruption game with its novel, pluggable, controller. We've had some reports back that things are going well. We won a place in the Alt.Ctrl.GDC novel controllers exhibit. There's a nice write-up of what we did here.

We've re-engineered the controller for the new event. We've gone for a larger box and nice, chunky cables to replace the thin ones that we used last time. It works rather well, which is nice. 

By all accounts the event is going well. Looking forward to finding out more about how he got on when he gets back next week. 

Cross Country Ski Race is Coming

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This is not an assignment about graphic design - obviously...

This is not an assignment about graphic design - obviously...

Kevin and I are just putting the finishing touches to the assignment for Programming 2 for this year. We always set two different scenarios, one a game and the other a line of business app. For the game we are doing "Cross Country Ski Race". For the line of business app we are doing "Cross Country Ski Race Manager". Almost like we have planned it. 

.it might not be one about UI design either..

.it might not be one about UI design either..

For the game, players have to steer their player down an increasingly tortuous ski run, avoiding the deadly, and somewhat improbable, "horizontal avalanche" that seems to have erupted. Fortunately an explosion at a nearby cheese mine has left their path littered with life giving cheese which they can use to recover their strength. 

For the manager application they have to track competitors, generate reports and produce a fully tested solution. Should be fun. 

Hyper Busy Open Day

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If you want to see a higher quality version of the picture, and find yourself on it, you can click though the image to the version on Flickr

If you want to see a higher quality version of the picture, and find yourself on it, you can click though the image to the version on Flickr

Another hyper-busy open day today. Thank you all so much for coming to see us, hope that it was worth the trip. Everybody left clutching their free copy of the "Bananas" edition of the C# Yellow Book that we are using with the First Year at the moment. On the right you can see an exclusive image of the latest printing of the book, with the hyper-realistic 3D rendered cover art. 

Theme Park God

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One of the fantastic things about this job is the capacity of students to surprise you with the things that they do. Yesterday, in the First Year Labs, Michael asked me if I wanted to have a look at the game he'd been working on for a little while.

It's really nice.

It's a Theme Park simulation written in Scratch. You can have a go here. Quite a few thousand people already have.  I told Michael that he must promise to start writing a blog about the game and how he made it, and I really hope he does. 

.. and we're back

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Cottingham station at 6:30 am. Looks more model than real. 

Cottingham station at 6:30 am. Looks more model than real. 

Monday was not a great day. I staggered home after my last lecture and went straight to bed. And stayed there. Mostly. Yesterday I found out that the same thing had happened to number one son. And we'd both eaten at the same burger place on Saturday. 

Oh well. 

I'm back at work now, which is nice, frantically trying to catch up with two days of this'n'that.