Just checked the first commit date of the completely renovated Data structures and algorithms course repository. It was around December 2020.
Since then I have designed and implemented about ten exercises with unit tests in Java. And two course projects with unit tests. Plus about ten additional demos with Swift. All with commentary and instructions.
In a week the new course begins. I’ve recorded about 20 hours of new lecture materials. Additional videos about graph programming with C++ will be included from last year demos.
One of the reasons for not posting too much lately ?
The video is about one of the course project implementing a graph data structure with various algorithms including Dijkstra’s shortest path finding algorithm. I thought applying this in a game context would perhaps motivate the students to dwell into the world of data structures and algorithms. We’ll see….
Apparently I am too busy to write anything here. Or … priorities… or workload… Work, life, etc.
During the Summer 2020 I decided that I want an app in the App Store. So I did it.
Slippery Cities (Liukkaat kadut in Finnish, Hala Gator in Swedish) warns pedestrians of slippery weather conditions in six Finnish cities. That photo above of my Apple Watch says that in Oulu there was a slippery alert two hours ago. So wear your spiked shoes. Or be careful out there.
I learned a lot about:
Swift programming
SwiftUI programming
WatchKit development with Xcode
Localisation for three languages
Accessibility programming in Apple platforms
AppStore: submitting apps for review (no issues by the way, app went through without any hassle)
Programming in watchOS, including watch faces, complications, background processing, networking,… with beta version of watchOS 7.
Buy it in the App Store, I want to get rich. Mind you, it may not work in the city you live, so consider that. Won’t refund you unless you twist my arm hard.
Then other things keeping me busy. Created a new course on Software Platforms and Ecosystems with two colleagues. That was hard. Luckily also behind us for a while, since the course ended in December.
I also took responsibility for a course on data structures and algorithms. Corona pandemic made that harder than usual, since the course material and arrangements were based on the assumption of face-to-face classroom teaching. Didn’t happen.
Now I am working on a course on server programming, which is a new course for me. I’ve been implementing a HTTPS chat server with Java and writing instructions for students to do the same. Topics include Java, HTTPS, certificates, authentication, JSON, sqlite database, password hashing and salting, UTF, encoding, decoding, HTTP headers,… Maven, Visual Studio Code, git — lots of work, since none of this existed in late December and course started in early January. ?
Then another course where I assist in exercises on advanced software testing and security issues started this week. Lots to learn for me there too.
So I’ve been very, very busy. Maybe in Spring 2021 I’ll be sharing more here.
Oh yes, and some nice things too — got myself a new Mac Mini M1, an Apple Silicon computer. So enjoying doing these things with the new device! My previous iMac 27″was already five years old, luckily in a good condition. I got a decent price for it when I sold it to fund the Mini.
Fall teaching season has started with one old course already ongoing. Devices and networks. My part is the networks, so currently I can focus on two new courses starting in October. Data structures and algorithms is an old course but I’ll take responsibility for it this year.
Another course, Platforms and ecosystems is a new course. Meaning I have hands full in creating material for the new course together with two other teachers. And at the same time, familiarising myself with the data structures course.
For the data structures course, I’ve worked earlier with the demo sorting app implemented using Swift. No time to add additional sorting methods there, but should build it with new Xcode, Swift and iOS 14 to see if there are any (breaking) changes.
What I did recently is that I implemented simple (and stupid) array and linked list classes, both in C++ and Swift, to demonstrate the effectiveness of creating and accessing arrays in comparison to linked lists. Will be using that when discussing why different data structures have different (preferred) usage situations. And that there may be conflicting requirements for the data structure in an app. Then you just have to make compromises.
Another important thing to show to the students is that you need to build the release version before comparing or measuring performance.
Remote teaching challenges the way I have given feedback to students. Sometimes the things to comment are largish software design models with associated documentation. When teaching face to face, it is easy to explain, point with fingers, talk together. But in isolation, that is not possible. Commenting their work in writing takes a long time and leaves room for misinterpretations.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I decided to experiment giving audio comments instead of written ones. I look at their documents and UML models, and record my comments into an audio file. The file is then shared from cloud to the student group. For me this is faster than writing. Students are able to follow my thoughts since I take care to pinpoint what I see when I record the audio. Video conferencing could be an option but requires everyone to be there at the same time. Comments on recorded video? – does not provide enough added value, in my opinion. Furthermore, I am able to comment thoroughly (face to face teaching is usually in classroom hours, which are limited) which may benefit the quality of the work. Negative side is that students must tolerate my an hour or so long ramblings about their work in the worst case… I have now given feedback to 16 student deliveries, perhaps around 12-13 hours of comments.
Anyways, as this seems to work, I may continue giving audio feedback after the corona virus isolation ends. Whenever that may happen…
Not a real student feedback recording. I already deleted those from my machine.
Our curriculum, Information processing Science, has been and is going through big changes. Many courses are put to rest and new ones created. Personally, this means many changes to my teaching portfolio.
Firstly, the course on Embedded Software Development Environments will cease to exist. ESDE, a master level course, was a successor to Mobile systems development course I taught in cooperation with Tampere University of Technology. Even before that, I was involved with mobile development related courses Symbian programming. So the years long track of teaching mobile programming, lately on Android, is now closing for me.
Another master level course disappearing is the Open Source Software Development, where I was responsible for course exercises for the past two years. There the students worked — under my watchful eye — on a distributed Java client-server project hosted in GitHub. The goal of that project was to learn how to communicate and coordinate fixing issues and providing new features to the project by using git: forking, branching, committing and providing pull requests to the main project, following the contribution guides and license terms of the project.
Third course I have a long history with is the Software engineering (BSc) course. My first paid job as a student at the Department of Information Processing Science somewhere around the end of 1980s was to type the handwritten lecture notes of professor Koskela to a Word document. Printouts were then sold as course material by the student guild Blanko. I also taught the course at the Open University, travelling to many cities and villages in Northern Finland for Friday night and Saturday lecturing sessions. Later, I was responsible for the course and the development of it for many years. The course is now changed from a 2nd study year course, integrating previous courses’ content before practical software project, to an introductory course in the first study year. Others will take charge.
Finally, I have decided to leave the Software architectures course. This 2nd year bachelor level course also has a long history of cooperation with Tampere University of Technology. The course is their making, based on their significant research on software architectures. At some point, I decided to take the exercises here in Oulu to more practical direction, studying source code of existing distributed systems and transforming the architecture based on new functional and non-functional requirements. In my opinion, this approach better illustrates the practical significance of various architectural solutions and the purpose of architectural diagrams, than just drawing pictures without any concrete connection to actual source code. The cooperation with TUT ceased some years ago but since their material was open sourced, I continued to use the lecture slides (updated by me yearly) with my own exercises and exercise projects.
Leaving now these courses behind, I will return back to teaching programming courses in bachelor level. I will take charge of Data structures and algorithms course, and will spend a considerable amount of teaching hours on a new course on server side app development. There is also one new course in the master level on platforms and ecosystems I am participating in, but the course is in the very early stages of development, so not much to say about that yet.
