Incoming engineering and computer science students often ask "which computer should I get?" when preparing for university life. I tackled this a few years ago on Twitter and in my previous blog posts in 2020, 21 and 22. The basics remain the same: Laptops are useful tools Macs are fine for most ("Air" not "Pro") […]
The assessment of student learning in the formative stage of a university programming class has become very challenging for a number of reasons: the pandemic has generally disrupted learning processes at the elementary and high school levels Prior to the pandemic, reading and note-taking habits had changed, possibly making them less effective. IDE-specific tools catch […]
One of my teaching assistants uploaded my instructional material to Course Hero without my permission. It didn't take me long to figure out who it was. I only had a handful of TAs and the TA used their university user ID as their Course Hero login. When I confronted the TA about it, the TA […]
This is a short version of the more detailed post here. Your course's learning outcomes are likely tied to a "graduate attribute indicator" GAI. The learning outcome is specific to your course, but the GAI is applicable across both the program and the entire Lassonde school. When looking to assess your learning outcome, examine the […]
The Titan submarine was officially declared destroyed yesterday, and everyone aboard it dead, not far from the wreck of the Titanic. In the days, months and years to come, scientists, engineers and journalists will comb through documents and videos to determine what went wrong and who should be blamed for the tragedy. A number of […]
For anyone reviewing older videos or blog pages for Virtual Programming Lab on YorkU's eClass system, it's important to note that the settings "gear" has moved.
Here I'm going to outline an exercise in Matlab that combines the following features: A text file with four variants of the question Random selection of the variant Visual component in the form of an ASCII-art equation, like this: 2 ⋅ s + 4 ⋅ t a = ───────────── s + t The objective is […]
Introduction This is the fifth in a series of twelve posts on recommended ways to assess learning outcomes in an engineering and computer science school whose programs follow the CEAB graduate attributes model of program characterization either directly or indirectly. These posts are intended to be used as a guide for instructors to design assessments […]
Heard about Virtual Programming Lab (VPL) and eClass at York and want to "kick the tires" a little? If you haven't already, VPL is a plugin for Moodle (eClass at YorkU) that allows instructors to create interactive programming activities for students. Here is some introductory material. [this may need an update after the update in […]
It's important to have dynamic 24/7 interactive activities for programming classes. There are plenty of solutions out there, including Matlab Grader and Möbius. The folks at Jetbrains have their Academy system, too. What I need, at this stage, is a no bells-and-whistles, auto-grader for Matlab code that can run a unit test on a student's […]