Ed - University presentations / IT lessons at schools and more!

I'm off for a few days this week, but there was plenty on last week so I'd better get a blog entry penned before I jet (drive) off to Bath!

Last week, I was up in Sheffield giving a presentation to their Computer Science department about what it's like to work at a big software company. I went with Tom (who joined Hursley the same year as me), because between the two of us we've worked on development, test and support - the three main roles on a software project. We also happened to go on an IBM training course together, learning techniques for presenting. We gave our talk without any slides, and asked the audience to write down any questions or areas they wanted us to address on big sheets of paper that we stuck up around the room. Then we adapted our pitch as we went along to ensure it was relevant to them. It all went smoothly, and it was fun to put something we'd learnt on a training course into practice!

In the last IT lesson we taught before half term, because the children are learning about simulation and 'villages in India' this term - we had prepared a Java simulator (think Sim City, but with an Indian village!) for them to get stuck into. They had to manage money, food and population in their village by choosing what to build and when - the simulation ran in blocks of one month, so the children would review their resources, take advice from their (in game) advisers, select the things they wanted to build that month and then click 'Go' to see what their decisions had on the village. We have a live leader board up on the projector at the front of the class, so the children could see how they were scoring against the rest of the class each time they completed the simulation.

This Monday's game development session was a bit less successful, we got too distracted by the office foosball table to get any real work done, so an update on the wizards with guns will have to wait until next week when we reschedule the coding session!

Ed