Robs Magic Marker

In December last year we spent a happy four days marking first year coursework. I'd printed out a marking sheet for each student and we sat down with each one and went through their programs filling in the marks. At the end I had around 200 forms that had been filled in during the marking, the next step is to enter these into the assessment system.

This seems like the hard way to do it, and it is. But it is the only way that I can check to make sure that all the grades from the different makers line up and that every student gets appropriate feedback.

Imagine my joy when I discovered that when I created the assignment on the university assessment system I'd accidentally selected the "anonymous marking" option. This means that the submissions on the system are, ahem, anonymous, not in an alphabetic list like the one that I'd carefully created. And there's no way that I can "de-anonymise" them. So now I have to sort all my paper sheets into numeric order and then run the risk that I'd get things mixed up.

Fortunately I'm a programmer and so I reckoned I could fix this. Turns out that "anonymous" means "indexed by student number", which is something I can easily obtain for each student. And the submission system has a "bulk download" option so I can bring down all the submissions and then fiddle with them on my computer.

I've ended up with a little program that does all the heavy lifting for me. It gets all the entries, matches names with numbers, lets me enter comments and generates the marking spreadsheet ready for upload into the system.

It took me a morning to create (which is around the time that it would have taken me to sort the paper copies) and I can use it with the assignments from now on.  Sometimes you do get progress from your mistakes.....

Update: A sharp eyed reader has spotted that my cunning technique makes a bit of a mockery of "anonymous marking" as it turns out I was able to map the submissions onto the students with just a bit of C#. That's true, and any member of staff who wanted to could find out the author of a so-called "anonymous" work. However, we don't use this technique to prevent this kind of bad thing. Instead we use it to prevent "unconscious bias".

I was not a fan of anonymity when it was introduced, I saw it as a criticism that implied I might be inclined to victimize particular students if I knew who they were. However, it is not like that at all. If I know Fred, and I'm marking Fred's work, then I'm going to bring to the process all my knowledge of what Fred is like. If the mark I come up with is a bit low, but I happen to think that Fred is quite good, I might inflate it to compensate for this. This is unfair. Fred should get the mark the work is worth.

If all I see is the student number when I'm marking it is much less likely that I'll know  that it is Fred who did the work, and the mark I come up with will be impartial. 

In this case we mark the work in front of the student and so the question of anonymity does not arise. The student is in a position to discuss the mark that they have been awarded to make sure that justice is done, and so I don't see a fairness problem in this situation. But I'd never use it to break "proper" anonymity as this actually makes my job more difficult. When I'm marking exam scripts I much prefer not to know who wrote them, this makes it easier to just focus on what is in front of me. 

The Quest for a Tidy Desk

One of my more sensible resolutions is to have a tidy desk where possible. I tried this before and it worked well, until some kind of task based entropy kicked in and things got all untidy again. But today I started with my "making things" desk and it is now a lot more tidy, as you can see above. . 

The idea is to have enough storage space so that I can get something out, work on it and then put it away before moving onto the next task. We'll just have to see how this goes. When I get my office desk tidy (which is presently such a mess that I'm too ashamed to post a picture) then I'll be able to say that I've cracked this one. 

Lego Birds

Lego have this neat idea where you can propose ideas for kits and, if there is enough interest, they'll release one. Lego Birds is one idea that has now made it into the shops. 

I got one today. It looks rather fun and the models should go nicely on the mantelpiece. 

...Broken

..then I decided that this would be silly.

New Year Resolutions

I thought Id try out a few New Year Resolutions, just to see if any of them would work.

One thing I thought might be sensible and give me a bit more free time would be to resolve not to blog every day.

Exploding Robots

So I fancied having a go at building one of these Sainsmart balancing robots. But I wasn't sure how hard they would be to build. So I hatched a cunning plot. Get one for each for myself and number one son as Christmas presents and then, once he had built his and got it working, carefully copy it. 

The plan was working very well until a wire came off my robot and rather than providing a nice friendly 5 volts to the robot controller it delivered a much more unpleasant 11.3 volts. This did not end well. The voltage surge took out the Arduino board, the radio receiver and the gyroscope. Around ten pounds worth of damage. Wah. 

The good news is that the spares arrived today and my robot is now back on his wheels, lurching around the kitchen under sort of remote control. Getting the robot to balance was a bit of a challenge, my top tip is to just use the values given at the end of this video. 

I'm looking forward to adding a few more features.  Ideally I'd like to make him self tuning, or at least be able to tune the PID loop using the remote control rather than the fiddly trimmers that are supplied.

The kit is good value, the components are good quality and you get a lot of them. This would serve as the basis of a lot of interesting projects. 

Sorry About This

I've just had an idea for a game where players ring each other up and tell them not to wash any more. The working title is "Call of Dirty".

Roundabout is Crazy-Wonderful

The Roundabout game is completely crackers. You play the role of Georgio Manos, 'arguably the world's most famous revolving chauffeur'. Your job is to drive a bunch of wacky characters around the town of roundabout using a constantly rotating limousine.

The game is a fantastic example of how an interesting movement mechanic (timing the moves of your spinning car around obstacles including, er, roundabouts) has been used as the basis of a weird but wonderful narrative built around the strange folk who want to be taken for a ride. 

The whole affair, from the knowing dodginess of the acting to the crackers story, is a delight. You'll play through it in an afternoon (at least that is what number one son did) but there are missions aplenty once you've finished.  You can find it here.

Greeting Card Conundrums

So I'm tidying up at home today (it does happen) and I come across a box of Christmas cards that I bought last year and never sent. Oh well. 

Last year I got everything wrong. I bought a whole bunch of cards and then didn't get around to writing them. Then I noticed that some folks around the place were not writing cards this year, but instead donating to charity and sending round an email . So I thought I'd do the same.

Then the Oxfam web site crashed half way through my transaction and I wasn't sure whether I'd donated or not. By the time I got a bank statement that confirmed the money had moved it was too late to send any messages around. So I looked like I'd not even tried.

So this year I did things properly. Cards were written and delivered around the department (I was especially proud of how I wrote them in the order of the offices in the corridor so I could deliver them in one pass) and I've also made a donation. I had just enough cards too. (or so I thought until I found this extra box). 

Amiibos United

My retirement plan. Probably.

I blame Adam for this. During the build up to our Super Smash Bros Christmas Bash he was waxing lyrical about the amiibo models and the way that some of them are quite collectible as Nintendo (who cut their business teeth selling trading cards) have stopped making them already. The one I really wanted was the villager, along with the Wii Fit trainer. I got the pink one because I thought it looked cute. 

Now I get to agonize over whether or not to take them out of their boxes....

Christmas Quadcopters

As well as racing camels, we also found some time to do some quadcopter flying on Christmas Day. Number one son had built a new one (I think one of his hobbies is building flying machines) that had a POV (point of view) camera and we took it out for a quick fly.

The wind was a bit strong but we managed to get a bit flying action. I'd taken along my much more sensitive Parrot drone and I felt a tiny built guilty when, having watched number one son battle horizontal gusts of blustery wind, I decided not to fly mine. 

I did take some pictures though.

In flight

Point of View View.

Christmas Camel Racing

Hope you had a great Christmas. Ours was lovely. And we spent some time playing Camel Up, the best camel racing game I've ever played. (and I've played one or two).

You get to place bets on the leader at each stage and also on the the ultimate race result. The balance is very finely wrought and leaders can switch position in the blink of an eye, so you have to be somewhat strategic in where you put your money. 

My opinion of the game is in no way influenced by the fact that by some inspired bets I managed to win the first time we played (I came last in the second game).

Great fun for up to five players.

Christmas Eve Bokeh

Christmas Eve Fun Fact: Bokeh is the term used by photographers to describe the quality of the out of focus parts of a picture. Turns out that the designers of a lens pay nearly as much attention to the blurry performance of a lens as they do to how sharp the in-focus parts are.

By playing around with the aperture value  (the size of the hole through which the light arrives at the camera) you can get some quite nice bokeh effects. Try using your camera settings to make this hole as large as possible by using an f-stop value (the unit that cameras use) as small as you can. Great fun with Christmas tree decorations. 

Lightmesh Printing

Spent quite a bit of time today printing out shades for the LightMesh project. I've now built enough lights to set up a test strand and it is looking pretty good. It's not going to be ready for Christmas, but there's always next year..

The non-special Special Tool

Last week a bit fell off our oven, forcing me to abandon some pinball fun and go home to fix it. I love pinball, but I like eating even more. 

Anyhoo, once things had been put back together I noticed that the bulb in the oven light had failed. It was underneath a screw in glass dome that wouldn't come off. So I did what every self-respecting man of the new millennium would do. I went on to Amazon to find out what was out there that I could use to fix it. And I turned up a kit that include a replacement glass dome, a bulb and, most importantly, a special tool that could be used to remove the dome. 

Except that it didn't work. What do you call a special tool that doesn't work? Well, it's not special, that's for sure. So I had to do something that really, really, hurts. In all kinds of ways. I called in a man to fix it. 

Thanks to a cancellation he turned up in good time, produced a special too that looked exactly like mine and used it to remove the dome. Oh well. Perhaps some of the specialness in these tools comes from the person wielding it....

Anyhoo, we are now in a position to be able to watch the Christmas turkey cooking, which is exactly where I wanted to be.

Forza Horizons Storm Island Rocks

Forza Horizon 2 is an excellent game. It's probably not one for purists, I think that Forza does that better. I reckon it has the slightly "floaty" handingling reminiscent of Burnout and Need for Speed. But it is none the worse for that. And I know that I wouldn't even get around the first corner in a properly accurate driving simulation. 

Forza Horizon 2 has a great narrative that has you driving from town to town taking part in racing events as you build your reputation as someone who's good with a steering wheel. If you are the kind of person that doesn't like racing on the same track every time it is well nigh perfect. The environments are very well realised and there are tons of different ones. 

And now we have Storm Island. This is an add-on pack that rights one of the few wrongs with the original game. It adds lots of off road action.  For sixteen pounds you can have access to trucks, rally cars and all kinds of exotic off-roaders. Along with some suitably lumpy environments to drive them around. 

I've always loved rally driving games. Gran Turismo had some fantastic rally stages and while the cars in Forza Horizons 2 are all lovely and shiny I really missed the chance to sling them around in mud during a tropical rainstorm. The Storm Island add in brings the same quality of experience (driving narrative, excellent graphics, fantastic in car view, plenty of cars) to the off road experience. 

If you have Forza Horizon 2 I reckon you really should get this. It's around 3.5 Gbytes of download and well worth it. 

Registration for Global Game Jam 2015 Now Open

Global Game Jam is an amazing 48 hour game development event that runs worldwide (hence the name). We've had events in Hull over the last couple of years and this time the folks at Grimsby Institute are hosting the event. For those at Hull new to Global Game Jam; it is a bit like Three Thing Game but you all share the same theme. For those who don't know what Three Thing Game is like, you can find out here.

We'll be organizing a "magic bus" to get us all to Grimsby and back  (actually it will be quite an ordinary bus, but the magical part is that we will be paying for it - not you) and sorting cheap accommodation for the event. 

From a Hull University student's point of view the timing is pretty much perfect. The even runs over the weekend of the 23rd - 26th of January, just at the end of the inter-semester gap week, giving you time to get together with your team and sort out project management (see yesterday), toolchains and game plans. If you want to take part (and you really, really should) you can sign up here. 

Social Media and Professional Work

Peter and I have spent quite a bit of time this week watching our second year students present their solutions to a commercial development problem that we set this semester. We created groups of students, gave them an incomplete specification, some legacy database code and turned them loose. It's been great fun. 

One thing that is very important is that team members are in contact with each other during any development like this. Lots of teams told us that they had created private Facebook groups and used these to set up meeting and manage interactions. This worked well because, as they pointed out, they are all on Facebook and this makes it easy for them to keep in touch with each other. So it works, but is it professional?

After a few presentations I'd think I'd figured the right way to make the point that this  probably isn't the best way to do it. I asked each group if they thought it would be OK for Peter and I to use a private Facebook group to store and manage their assessment results. Nobody thought this was a good idea. Even though the situation is exactly the same as someone writing software for money. 

So, the lesson here is that if you're working on a proper project you should probably use proper tools to manage your group interactions. Take a look at Yammer, Basecamp, or Trello. These are perfect for short term student projects as they seem to have trial (or free) versions that would sit will with student assessments. And they are another skill you can put on your CV. Employers are just as interested in your experience with project management tools as they are with anything else.

You could even do something cunning like pick a system you've not to used for your next Three Thing Game team entry. Then write a blog post on how you got on with it later. 

Word Search Fun

If you fancy having a go at the wordsearch that we used yesterday you can find it here.

Super Smash Christmas Bash

Today we had our Christmas Bash. This is usually a fairly quiet and select gathering, what with a lot of coursework being due and folks going home for Christmas. But we still found enough people to get through 128 pounds worth of pizza, which is a success of sorts....

Thanks to Adam and his advance purchasing power this event had a strong Super Smash Bros theme. He had managed to get a complete set of amiibos as prizes (including the much sought after Villager amiibo) and set up a tournament for folks to win them. We also had the lovely folks from Platform Expos with their network of Xbox One consoles playing Titanfall. Lob in Halo collection, Super Mario Kart and a wordsearch and you get a pretty good night's worth of entertainment. 

A tense moment in Titanfall

If you have any fears about the survival of Nintendo or the future of their Wii U console I really don't think you have much to worry about. From the reaction to the 8 player action (and the fun I had playing it too) I reckon they are going to be fine. One hard core PC gamer left with a newly acquired amiibo and a plan to try and get a console for Christmas. Great stuff

The winners with their prizes

Of course we had a wordsearch. Of course some people came along, sat down with it and spent all their time finding words. And one of them won a prize.

A worthy winner, but still some words left to find...

We were having so much fun that we forgot about the timings and the event ran on for quite a while after the finish time. And we will definitely be having another Super Smash Bros session next year. There are more pictures of the event on Flickr. You can find them here.