DATE09 TPC Meeting on Wednesday, November the 5th

The DATE09 (Design, Automation and Test in Europe) TPC (Technical Program Committee) meeting is going to be held at the awesome IET building, Savoy Place, London this year. Wednesday the 5th of November to be precise. For full details refer to the DATE09 TPC website, http://date09-tpc.ecs.soton.ac.uk/.

Coursework for Academics....

We are now discussing the changes to the courses for next academic year. The main push on at the moment is directed at enhancing our teaching of software to the electronics undergraduates.

COMP1010 Big changes here to alter how we teach this module. The previous course centered on teaching as much C as possible using Visual Studio, with a lab a week reinforcing the lecture topic. To improve things by engaging the students more we are moving a lot of the C syntax and content into the semester 2 course. This leaves room for the introduction of AVR microcontrollers along with a bit of computer architecture. Hopefully this will engage the students immediately. The programming will be done in AVRStudio with WinAVR as the compiler. The assessment will be significantly changed to favour two "Exam Labs" which will be open book individual assessments. The first will have a lot of direction and the second will be solving a problem. Appropriate assessment of any course is essential for its success, and I personally belive in problem based learning as one of the most enjoyable and effective techniques.

ELEC1013 The main change here is the labs have been shortened and there will be more of them. There is also an open question whether to include an AVR Microcontroller that can be used over USB or networked to encourage the Computer Science students who take this course to mess about with gadgets.

Writing Referral Exam Questions

Unfortunately not all students pass the exam, and this is their second chance. History suggests that some will work very hard and do well, and some will (despite hard work in some cases) not. In many ways this is quite a difficult part of being an academic - assessment.

I am now Master of Masters!

Not as cool as it sounds, but I hope to do a good job. I now organize and manage the MSc summer projects.

The first batch of real exam marking this year

I have several thoughts for essential exam marking equipment:

1. A stamp with a large red `?'
2. Calming tablets

You need 1 when a student does a brain dump or creates an unconnected string of words. You need 2 when your paranoia increases as a student returns an answer that matches your perfect one. Luckily either extreme is rare, however they typically dominate the whole script.