Tag: Education
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The missing link and closing schools
London, where I am writing this, is now perhaps the global centre of the covid19 pandemic, thanks to a mutation of the virus that has allowed it to spread more easily. This mutation may not have come into existence in the South East of England but it has certainly taken hold here, and about 2%…
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Open source alternatives to “Junior Librarian v3”?
My partner is a teacher in a primary school and has special responsibility for teaching English – which also means she’s in charge of the school library. I don’t have any personal experience of the library and Lorraine is not an IT or database expert, so what follows may be a bit sketchy… …anyway, the…
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Was new maths really such a disaster?
On holiday now, so I fill my time – as you do – by reading books on maths. One of these is Julian Havil’s Gamma: Exploring Euler’s Constant. The book begins with a foreword by Freeman Dyson, in which he discusses the general failure, as he sees it (and I’d be inclined to agree), of…
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Raspberry Pi ideas wanted
Every week I teach a group of 9- and 10-year-olds some core programming skills using Scratch. The children seem to love it and I certainly enjoy it – it’s good fun to see them tackle the problems and find solutions: it really reminds me of the reasons, ongoing C++ debugging slog not withstanding, that I…
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1 March 1971
Forty-three years ago this day – in Belfast – was much like this day – in York (I am in the University library as I write this) – sunny and bright, not very warm but showing signs that winter was on the way out. That morning, in school, our P1 teacher did as she always…
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Some more thoughts on @CodeClub
This year’s Code Club teaching is nearly at an end – I cannot do next Friday and the Friday after that is the last of the school year, so it seems like a good time to reflect further on the way it has gone – though I am sure I will have some more thoughts…
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Nevile Gwynne talks grammatically correct cobblers
Nevile Gwynne is the sort of person the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph love. Descended from the nobility. Educated at Eton. Spouting prejudiced rubbish without reference to the facts. This morning, on the BBC’s Today Programme, he claimed that when he was growing up “everyone” knew their grammar at the age of nine and…
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The Art of Scratch, Code Club and the ICT curriculum
Regular readers will know I have something of a small obsession with Conway’s Game of Life – the classic “game for no players” based on cellular automata, and so, naturally enough, when I decided that I really had to write my own Scratch program from, err, scratch to sharpen up my skills for teaching children…
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Online translation a new way to learn a language fast?
This week’s New Scientist reports (online link below- it’s a short piece in the physical edition on p. 19) that Duolingo – a free online service designed to help people learn a new language by translating web content is working very well. To probe the site’s effectiveness, Roumen Vesselinov at the City University of New…
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Universities target plagiarism but maybe fraud should be the real worry
The first thing I had to do when I started work on my PhD course at York was to complete an online learning unit on plagiarism. It was fairly tedious, as I had already had to sit through several hours worth of lectures at Birkbeck on the issue when preparing for my MSc project report.…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 