Yesterday was the first day of teaching in this Fall semester. Times are a bit challenging; teaching resources for the courses I teach in have shrinked down to about 58-66% of last year’s teaching hours, depending on a course. Also the number of teachers for a course is down. While number of students is going up rather than down.
Face-to-face teaching is not possible with these resources and number of students (225-300+ in two of the courses ongoing currently). We’d be in the classroom every day from 8am to 8pm and still have overlapping teaching events. So online it is. Hello Zoom.
One feedback item from students last year was that the terminology is challenging in the Devices and data network course. Understandable: in five two hour lectures I should be able to give an overview of how computers work and the components they contain. The same for the networking, ten hours of lectures and they should get a grasp on how the Internet and packet networks do their thing. This means a constant shower of new terminology unfamiliar to 1st year students. Other courses have similar issues.
So I developed a dictionary app for students to use. Or actually two. One with Java for desktop computers:
And another one using Swift and SwiftUI for macOS, iOS and iPadOS:
Both apps get the dictionaries from the same source, a remote git repository with a JSON file, using HTTPS. Thus the dictionaries can be edited, appended to and updates are then downloaded to the users’ devices.
In the user device the terms are stored into a SQLite database, so they can be used offline. Users can search for the terms and follow the URLs to sources in the Internet to find out more.
The desktop versions also have a feature that generates a graph of the relationships between the terms by searching the terms from other terms’ description. For this, GraphViz must be installed on the device.
The Swift version has a Widget for all Apple platforms. The widget randomly shows a couple of terms a day from the dictionary. Here’s the iPhone widget (along with the GitHub app widget on top):
And here is the macOS Widget:
Clicking or tapping on the term on the widget opens the app and shows the description as well as English term for that specific ICT term.
The Java version is already public and available for installation. Swift version is still under development, I just need to decide how to distribute it to the various types of devices and prepare the App Store information with screenshots, descriptions and all. Then there is the inevitable App Store review waiting. Hopefully it’ll pass. This is yet another app for the category “downloads and renders JSON in a GUI”.
Hopefully the students find the apps useful for learning. Next I should focus on finishing the dictionary for the basic Internetworking part of my course and put also that available for the apps to download…