Facilitating learning

What makes a programming exercise good?

What makes a programming exercise good?

Questions to help people decide what to learn

Grades are pretty pointless if you’re teaching yourself (who cares if you got an A in sockets?). But formative assessments! If you could take some kind of evaluation to help you decide what exactly you should teach yourself next! That seems more useful. So I got interested in building some kind of “formative assessment” tool.

Encouraging a culture of learning across your organisation

Workshops are a great way of developing skills and sharing knowledge within your organisation, and they also encourage a culture of learning together. But running a workshop by yourself can seem daunting, especially if you aren’t an expert in the area you want your organisation to get better at.

Starting an Engineering Management Book Club

The premise is that as you climb the corporate ladder your “first team” - your support system - must become the peers at your level vs your team of reports.

When does teaching with comics work well?

When does teaching with comics work well?

Improv: Teaching Programming at Scale via Live Coding

Computer programming instructors frequently perform live coding in settings ranging from MOOC lecture videos to online livestreams. However, there is little tool support for this mode of teaching, so presenters must now either screen-share or use generic slideshow software. To overcome the limitations of these formats, we propose that programming environments should directly facilitate live coding for education. We prototyped this idea by creating Improv, an IDE extension for preparing and delivering code-based presentations informed by Mayer’s principles of multimedia learning.