robmiles.com

I did a bit of surgery on my Fez Micro Framework Robot yesterday. I took off his “bustle” at the back. I say his bustle, because my Micro-Framework robot is now called Jason, in honour of the JSON framework I’m working on to give him simple two way communication with a host machine.

The bustle was fine, but it hung out over the back a bit, and I wanted to make him (it?) a bit leaner and meaner. The new slim line Jason has all the sensors on his nose. He has a range finder right at the front and a pair of line followers underneath and coloured LEDs he can use to tell the world how he feels. At the moment he zooms around the living room nearly bouncing off things. I must admit it is great fun building him and writing programs to control what he does. You can write any number of desktop apps, but there is something very satisfying about seeing your code make the robot rush up to a wall, notice it, spin round and then vanish under the sofa. I’ll put up some more construction details later, when I’ve finished playing…

I must admit I was a bit underwhelmed when I first saw Kodu. At first glimpse I couldn’t see how it would help to teach people how to program.

It turns out that this is because it is not really a teaching tool as such.   The point that I seemed to miss was that the intention was to put people in touch with the experience of making a machine do a fairly complex task under their control. Rather than teaching programming, they were aiming to teach the joy of programming. Then, with a bit of luck, folks who find this fun will move into more formal ways of making this happen and turn to real coding.

I downloaded the free Kodu Technical Preview which runs on the PC (you can also get the program on Xbox Live for 400 credits) and had a play. It is great fun. In no time at all I had created a world and had my little creature running round after the ball and picking it up.  I want to have another go with this.

I can see this being one of those things you show your kids and then after a while they will grab the gamepad and kick you off the machine so that they can have a go at finding all the things you can do with the environment. At first I was comparing the system with Little Big Planet, which also offers a way you can build your own worlds, but I think Kodu is better in this respect. It is presented from the start as an environment where you create behaviours, rather than as a platform game you can add things to.

From a teaching perspective it is great in that it gets you thinking about a program as a sequence of actions and decisions, and that is fine by me. 

I must admit that I’ve not actually played the game. But I have watched number one son play quite a bit of it on his laptop. Seeing him play you could have mistaken the action for a movie. The dialogue is so seamless, with the voice acting so pitch perfect for the various options he was choosing that it was only when I saw the screen that I figured out that he was actually making selections, and not just watching a cut scene.

The action looks good too, with a rich (if a bit scary) story beginning to play out. Anyone who doesn’t think that video games can stand alongside other art forms is seriously behind the times. This really is a new medium, and games like this show just what you can do with it.

Excellent.

I was talking to our .NET Development Postgrad students and we decided that there were a few things that you should be familiar with if you want to become a “proper” Software Engineer. These are the things I think you should do:

Read “Code Complete 2” by Steve McConnell. Perhaps the best book ever on software construction.  Then keep your copy where it is handy, and have a policy of reading a bit now and then, just to keep up to speed. If you can track down a copy of “Rapid Development” you should read this to.

Read I.M. Wright’s “Hard Code” blog. And buy the book if you like.

Read “How to be a Programmer”. Excellent stuff.

This is not everything you should do. There are other good places to look. But it is a start. Oh, and if anyone out there has other ideas about good, pragmatic texts for budding coders, then let me know and I’ll add them.

I spent some time this morning working on the logo for the 2010 Where Would You Think T-Shirts. We give these away to guests who attend our Admissions Open Days in the department and they have a slightly different design each year.

The release of the design is of course an event eagerly awaited by the fashion press, and it is rumoured that Chanel, Christian Dior and Yves Saint-Laurent actually hold back releasing their spring collections until they see what we have come up with.

The byword this year is “Tag chic”. You can point your cameraphone at the design and the magic of Microsoft Tag will take you to our admissions community site.