First rule of Code Club: Do talk about Code Club

I picked up some flyers....

Yesterday evening I popped down to C4DI to hear Linda Broughton talk about Code Club. I'd not heard of it before, but now I have I think it is a splendid idea. The idea is to give pupils in primary schools some experience of coding, not necessarily with the aim of producing a nation of Mark Zukerbergs, but instead giving kids an appreciation of what software is all about.  

Making, modifying and fixing simple programs is a great way to introduce kids to problem solving and diagnostic techniques that have a huge range of applications, not least in writing code. Code Club has material for Scratch (a neat game creation system), making web based solutions and Python. Volunteers spend an hour a week with the kids going through the content in the context of an after school club. About code. Hence the name. 

Code Club do all the heavy lifting, sorting out the insurance and health and safety issues, along with checks that have to be performed so that you can go into schools. You can also work from their curriculum, so you just have to turn up and do the session.  You sign up on their web site (as a school or a volunteer) and then both parties can do a postcode search to find nearby partners to get involved with. 

I think I'm going to sign up for this, but better yet I think it is something that students (and staff in our department) should get involved with. We've run school events before and I've always found that working with kids like this is great fun. Any students who fancy getting involved (it looks great on your CV and gives you some great life skills) can get in touch with me if you like, and we'll see if we can sort out a Hull based effort.

Charlotte Talks Industrial Placements

As soon as I found out that Charlotte Godley, one of our students, had landed a placement at Airbus Industries I made a mental note to ask her to do a Rather Useful Seminar on her experience when returned to the department. Today she came along and gave that seminar.

It was excellent.

Charlotte started with reasons why you should take a placement for a year. (it just makes you all round more awesome) and reasons why not (it is hard work, and you might get out of step with chums in your cohort who will graduate just as you come back). Then she spoke about the best way to get a placement. I think her approach really boils down to three words.

Have a plan.

Having a plan means things like finding out about a company and tailoring your CV and accompanying letter to chime with what they do. It means thinking about the kind of questions you might get asked at interview and coming up with some really good questions of your own for the company. It means preparing for careers events and making hit lists of companies to target. But most important, it means giving some thought to what you really want to do in your future.

A placement is a great way to find out if you really want to work in a large company, or write Python programs, or travel the world in a van solving mysteries (my favourite). It is also a great way to learn the ways of work, where suddenly everyone around you is not the same generation as you and everything stops at 5:30 leaving you exhausted but looking for things to occupy yourself with.  

Charlotte gave a very good description of these issues and the fact that there were so many detailed questions at the end of the session was a testament to how well the material had been delivered. She has put her slides up on her blog, and I've asked if she wouldn't mind doing a screencast of the deck, as I'm sure it would be useful to all our students.

We are having a Careers and Internships Networking event in two weeks. Hull students can sign up here and get a set of free business cards that they can pass around. We'll be releasing the list of companies coming along so that you can prepare your "hit list".

Students from any year really should come along. First years can be thinking about internships over summer (we have some developers in the cohort who would be well up for this) and second and onward years can be thinking about taking years out or finding employers.

Free C# Course and a Shiny New Kindle C# Yellow Book

I've spent the last couple of weeks swearing at HTML files. Who would have thought that converting a Word document into nicely formatted markup could be so difficult. Anyhoo, I've finally managed to get the text into some sensible shape and it now has a proper Kindle table of contents.  If you have already bought my C# Yellow Book on Kindle,  then you might like to update your copy.  If you haven't you can get one here.  And why not?

Of course the original version is available at the usual place. And I've also added the entire content of our First Year programming course from last year. This includes over 100 slide decks, practical sessions and the assessed coursework. The content is free for anyone who wants to teach C# or learn it. Enjoy.

Red Nose Day + Three Thing Game + Pink Tutu : What could go wrong?

A note for your diaries folks. On Friday 13th of March I'll be doing one of my (in)famous Lectures in Rhyme in aid of Comic Relief. You can find out more (and sponsor me) here. You can also marvel at the strange distortion of my face in the picture. Or perhaps I always look like that. Ugh. 

Anyhoo, after the fun and frivolity of the lecture we'll be embarking on a Red Nose Day themed Three Thing Game. We'll have "rent a thing" events and allow you to exchange your real money for extra "Bank of Thingland" pounds to get more auction winning powers.

My fundraising target is £1,500. If we reach that before the event I will do the lecture wearing a pink tutu. Apparently you can get away with a lot of stuff in the name of charity.....

Hornsea Pictures

One of the great things about living in Hull is that you can get up on a lovely morning like today, decide to go somewhere nice, and within 25 minutes be by the sea in Hornsea. Great place.

There beach was looking good too. 

Open Day Pic

I promised these folks, who came along to our open day today, that I'd put them in the blog.

Turns out that I'm a man of my word. 

Four Letter Word Generator

Well, here's something completely crackers that you can buy for less than ten pounds from Tindie. It's a Four Letter word associative database all on a single tiny chip. You can ask it for a random word, and then get another word kind of associated with it. There's a blog post here that tells you how it works. 

Of course I ordered one. It arrived today in a big padded envelope, sent all the way from Japan. Next I have to build a bit of hardware to read the words out and display them. I'm thinking it might make an awesome idea generator for Three Thing Game.  The "Three Thing'omatic", I can see it now.....

Happenings in the Department

Muyiwa Olu  gave a really good (and Rather Useful) seminar this week about the Python language. It is great to see someone being enthusiastic about a platform they obviously enjoy working with. I reckon that every programmer should have a bit of Python in their lives, because it is just such a fun language, and it was lovely to see some of the features brought to life. A great presentation from one of our second year students. 

You can find the slide deck for the session here. 

Next week we have Charlotte talking about Computer Science internships and her time at Airbus Industries writing software, including some Python code...

This week we also had our first meeting of the new "Embedded Development Club". Quite a few folk turned up, if just half of them come back next week with some kit to play with then we'll consider that a win. You can find the slide deck for the presentation here. 

And tonight we have a Hardware Meetup at C4DI. It's all go.

Benchmarking the Raspberry Pi 2 in Python

Well, I went off the the Post Office and got my Raspberry Pi 2. I really wanted to find out what kind of improvements you see when you use it.

The answer is, a lot. 

Booting was snappy, and the time to launch X-Windows was quite a bit quicker (although I'm not sure of the effect of the different SD cards I was using). But things got quite conclusive when I ran a little Python profiler:

• Original Raspberry Pi B:  207 function calls in 0.017 seconds
• Raspbery Pi B 2: 207 function calls in 0.003 seconds

This is just one test, but it shows a lot of promise. Python really seems to benefit from the extra cores as well as the faster processor.

Just pootling around the internet with the browser is a lot quicker than the original Raspberry Pi, but doesn't really compare with my super cheap Linx tablet, which is on paper a broadly comparable device. I'm not yet convinced that someone looking at the Pi 2 as a desktop replacement will find it a good plan, but as a step up from the original it is fantastic.

Raspberry Pi 2 and Windows 10

News of the Raspberry Pi 2 took me completely by surprise. And then, to add to this shock I find that it is not only an awesome device, but available to buy right away. Amazing. Who do these people think they are? Apple?

If the news of a new Pi with quad core processor and twice as much RAM wasn't enough though, I then find that the new Pi will be able to run Windows 10. For free. The only word I can think of to sum up this turn of events is blimey. 

The Windows 10 support will be limited to "universal" applications, which means an end to  any dreams of running Visual Studio on a device you paid 25 quid for. But that does mean that you can use Visual Studio to write and deploy programs onto the device, which will be great. You can find out more about Windows 10 on Pi here.

The development puts a mild question mark over devices such as Galileo and Edison, which are of the same ilk, but are more expensive and have no display capability. I guess everything will settle down and find its place eventually. The two Intel devices probably have a bit more straight line speed, although the 900 MHz four core processor in the new PI is not to be sneezed at. 

Anyhoo, my Raspberry Pi 2 is presently sitting in Cottingham Post Office waiting for me to drop round and pick it up. I actually bought 2. One to give the Video Arcade Table a shot in the arm, and the other for playing with.  We really do live in interesting times. 

Update: I've had a chance to do a very quick benchmark and compare the performance of the original and the new Rapberry Pi. You can find out more here. 

Welcome Back to 08120

I actually typed this in live in front of the First Year class this afternoon, just at the start of my 1:15 lecture. I was very impressed by the silence as I was typing it. But it stayed silent when they saw what it said......

Oh well. Welcome back folks for another semester of C# shenanigans. 

HTML Wrestling

I'm presently working in a much improved Kindle version of the World Famous (in my world) C# Yellow Book. Because the book has been written and upgraded over a number of versions the text formatting is a bit of a mess behind the scenes. It's taking a while to sort out.

I changed the style-sheet to make it a bit easier to see the code embedded in the text and got a preview page that I quite like above. With a bit of luck it should be finished in a week or so.

Is this the way to Amaryllis?

Number one wife got an amaryllis bulb for Christmas. It has just produced these lovely flowers. 

Light and Pictures

They say that you don't need great equipment for a good photograph. Just the right kind of light. I took this yesterday morning when we had around 20 seconds of good light. Not long, but enough for me to get my Smartphone out of my pocket.

After a bit of tweakage I'm quite pleased with the result. Next time I'll try not to have that tree in the way, although you might say it adds a certain something to the picture I suppose. Mainly a tree.

Embedded Developers Club

Quite a few folks seem very keen to set up an Embedded Development Club in the department. And that's just the staff members. We'll see how many students turn up at our first meeting on Wednesday 4th of Feb. at 2:15 pm in room 321 (the ITMB Lab) in the Robert Blackburn Building. 

You can find out more here

Bin Gone a While

It's hard to put into words the fear and paranoia that you suffer as a result of your garden waste bin going missing after it has been emptied.

But I'm going to try wheelie hard.  (sorry)

At least it came back. And we are going to stick a large friendly number on it. Before someone else does....

Programming At Hull Web Site

Over the last couple of days I've spent some time adding content to our WhereWouldYouThink web site. This is a site that has lots of stuff that might be useful to students in general and computer science students in particular.

I'm trying to rationalise some of the support materials that we have for programming and I've attacked the problem in the only way I know how.

I've bought another domain name.....

I've set up a microsite at the address programmingathull.com. This brings together all the stuff that we've put together to help folks learn to program. This includes the wonderful C# Yellow Book and Arduino and Python content. If we make anything else useful we'll put it there too.

Festival of Daring and Excitement

Last year we had a welcome Frag Fest day for our new First Year students. It was so successful that we are doing it again. The fun starts at 11:00 or so on Saturday 31st of January and runs through to 7:00 pm, with Pizza in the middle somewhere. 

We'll have all the usual suspects, including Team Fortress 2, a Wii U Super Smash Bros tournament and even board games and whatnot. It's open to any students or staff of the department. You can find out more here.

Grimsby Global Game Jam Rocked

The Blimbu team being photographed with their prizes. 

I wasn't able to take much part in the Global Game Jam this year. Circumstances conspired to limit my involvement to transporting Hull students who wanted to take part over to Grimsby Institute, where the competition was held this year. 

From the looks of things the competition went really, really well. Kudos to the Grimsby team for running an excellent competition.  The winners of the event were Blimbu, who are Game Jam veterans and have been producing high quality games from the very first Global Game Jam in Hull a couple of years ago.

You can take a look at the game that they made in only 48 hours here.

Consoles and Blu-Ray Players

So last night I settled down to watch Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It's a fine movie. Nowhere near as good as the TV series or the book, but well worth a watch. However the picture quality was horrible. At first I thought the flickering screen and grainy image were part of a period recreation, but then I remembered it being perfectly fine in the cinema. 

I discovered, after some messing around, that game consoles don't make very good Blu-Ray players. I tried a couple of devices and the results were pretty horrid on both of them to be honest, with tearing images and lots of noise. This might be something to do with the rest of my system, but because I'm the kind of person I am, I thought I'd try getting a dedicated player to see if it was any better. 

Oh yes it was. The difference was like night and day. Much much better. And the good news is that a decent player can be had for a comparatively low price these days, not far off the price of a video game (which is how I price most things to be honest).

My advice, such as it is, would be to think beyond using your PS3 or whatnot as a player and look into getting a "proper" one. This also has the useful advantage of making it much easier to actually watch movies. Now I can just put the disk into the machine and within seconds be watching a whole bunch of trailers I can't skip. With the console I have to find the controller, wobble through a bunch of menus and, if I'm lucky, a firmware update before I get to see things that are on the disk but shouldn't be in my way.

Up until now I've had a kind of "everything is digital" mindset about things like DVD players and whatnot, but my experience has been that there is actually quite a lot of subjective shenanigans going on between the signal source and the display.