Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Geek Take Aways

This one is only funny if 'get' encryption. Let's just say that 'adding salt' makes things better.

Saturday, May 27, 2017

It's Not Hard...

As teachers it feels like we spend a lot of time trying to convince our students that our subject is not all that hard. For some reason, the kids often remain skeptical.

Monday, May 22, 2017

Sometimes 'Compression' Makes things Worse

It turns out that we can use 'run length encoding' to compress things (it actually work best with numbers and text). An easy way to explain the concept is to get kids to compress black and white images (as shown in the cartoon below). One thing that they sometimes find surprising is that when compressing, there will pretty much always be cases where 'compressing' makes things worse. The key idea my students need to 'get' is that they should choose compression methods carefully so that this does not happen. I would not teach it quite this way but it makes for a fun cartoon.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

Student Optimism

When one is safe inside, driving rain and strong winds are not a problem.

Monday, May 15, 2017

Meetings...

I hate meetings with an unbridled passion - mostly because the vast majority are a waste of time.

Thursday, May 11, 2017

Hang On...

It's been one of 'those' weeks.  My Computer Science students are probably crazy enough to decode the message hidden in this one...

The image was made with the help of this nifty little site and clipart originally sourced from open clipart.

Friday, May 5, 2017

Steep Learning Curve...

Whilst I love GIMP because it is open source and really powerful, let's just say that it is not the most usable piece of software on my system.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Teacher Only Day (Part 2)

To be fair, it is unusual to see a presenter using copyrighted images. I'm guessing they don't know about pixabay. The image in question is blurred out on purpose...