Due to the corona virus pandemic, I’ve been working remotely since the end of February. I felt like having a cold and isolated myself before the University officially recommended that to the personnell. Not having the virus though, but a common cold only. Obviously I cannot be 100% sure since there are no tests available here unless you are critical workforce or seriously ill. So keeping myself isolated just in case, at home.
Luckily the grocery nearby delivers food and their app and website to create the orders works quite well. Today the second delivery is arriving, which should be enough for a week at least. They have a very high load of orders flooding the service. What I usually do is to create an order with a couple of products, select the delivery date about one week later, and then keep filling the order until the day before the delivery. By this day, I already have the next delivery date reserved, with a new growing list of items to order. In this way, we am able to secure the deliveries so that there will not be too long gaps in between.
Since the isolation started, I have continued to offer video sessions via MS Teams and Moodle discussion and chat support to the students in the Software architectures course. Fortunately, the course lectures and exercises were mostly over by the isolation started. Students continue working on their exercise work projects until the end of May. Luckily I have a fast network at home, and even better hardware than at the campus. That large iMac screen has proven to be quite a good a thing to have. Currently I am recoding audio feedback for the first phase of the exercise work projects to the students. The amount of feedback to give could be quite extensive, and text feedback is inferior to audio, in my opinion. Video in this case is not needed since I can easily pinpoint the things I comment by addressing the chapter titles and paragraph and page numbers. Let’s see how this works.
The study program and the research unit are using Zoom video sessions to keep in touch and organize during the pandemic. Probably this will last until summer, but I suspect there will be limitations and exceptional situation even in the Fall semester. Time will tell. University support staff has increased the online training of teachers, providing courses in Zoom on using Moodle, Teams and Zoom itself in teaching.
I’ve started to implement a small app with Swift to learn something new. The app is also something to use as a demonstration in Fall in the Data structures and algorithms course. I will take charge of that course after the summer break, so wanted to do something related to the topic.
Below is a demo video of the app in the early phases. I am planning to implement maybe a couple of more sorting algorithms and improve the graphics and usability of the app. YouTube is full of these kind of videos, so I will not put too much effort on this, like implementing tens of different algos.