teaching – Page 17 – dangermouse.net

A class for kids on playing & running tabletop RPGs

My new group class has been approved and is now public on Outschool:

Tabletop Roleplaying Games – Playing, Game Mastering & Writing Adventures

You can read all about it by following the link – but in brief it’s a forum-like community moderated by me, where kids aged 12-16 can discuss roleplaying games, ask me questions, and I will be posting tips and challenge activities for the kids to do. The kids enrol for access on a monthly basis, and it’s only US$5 a month. Also, since you’re reading my blog, if you sign a child up you use the code MORGANMAR5 at checkout to get the first month free.

I began this morning with another run, extending to 3.3 km this time. I’m trying to stretch to eventually being able to do 5 km regularly.

After getting home and cooling down, I checked out the assignments submitted by students in the university image processing course. I was enjoying not having to teach the tutorial on Monday night, but now I have six 50-page-ish reports and six 20-minute video presentations to mark! I’ll get stuck into that later this week.

I took Scully to the dog park for some exercise this afternoon. Last night she was a bit stir crazy, having just slept all afternoon, so today I made sure to get her running around, chasing a ball, and doing a walk down by the water to tire her out. It seems to have worked, as she’s now lying in her dog bed, fast asleep.

New content today:

Completely rewritten plans for Saturday

My Saturday was planned to be completely about writing Irregular Webcomic! strips in order to photograph a new batch of comics on Monday. But that all changed when I checked my email in the morning.

There was a newsletter from Outschool for teachers, and it announced a new type of class that we can start teaching: Groups. These are essentially social groups with the teacher as leader and moderator, guiding enrolled students by providing tasks, answers, comments, and feedback to students who are sharing their work. It’s done in a forum style, with no live Zoom sessions. Students enrol on a monthly basis, giving them access to the forum and teacher for that time.

I realised this is the perfect format for a group all about running roleplaying games and writing adventures for them, with learning goals based on social skills, problem solving, and exercising creativity. So in order to get in as early as possible and hopefully get a big share of students interested in this, I spent all day today writing a class outline for the group. And to submit it for listing, I also had to create header and banner images, and three videos – one for parents, one for students, and one as a welcome when students sign up. This was a lot of work, and pretty much took me the whole day up to when we had to depart for dinner.

We had a booking for dinner at a slightly fancy pizza/Italian place about 20 minutes drive away. It’s a nice place that we’ve been to a few times, and we thought it would make a good ending to our wedding anniversary week, since we didn’t manage to have a nice dinner on the actual day.

New content today:

Friday evening games night report

My Friday evening was busy with gaming night with my friends – still meeting online, though we may do a live gathering soon now that COVID restrictions have been lifted. We played games of So Clover, Azul, Coloretto, Incan Gold, and Sketchful.

Earlier in the day I did another 2.5k run, trying to keep up this strange idea of exercising not just once a week but more frequently. And I worked more on the course outlining for the university data engineering course. And ran a couple more Outschool classes on the topic of online product reviews for kids. I think I’ve found a better groove with this topic, and it’s working out better than the first day on Wednesday. The kids are generally pretty savvy about online stuff, and they have a sense of when to be suspicious. Several of them have mentioned that people could fake reviews, and there may be bots posting fake reviews. Most have said that they feel that deliberately posting false reviews is serious enough to be considered a crime.

Oh, and I wrote up a new review for Snot Block & Roll! I haven’t been travelling far enough in recent months to visit any new bakeries, but I spotted a new one opened within walking distance last week, and tried it out this week.

New content today:

Engineering some data

It was rainy today. I planned to take Scully to the dog park in the afternoon, but I know she doesn’t enjoy it when it’s cold and wet. If the temperature had been a bit warmer, I would still have taken her, but I don’t want her shivering in the cold.

I did another run this morning, 2.5k. I figure if I can try to do at least that much every weekday, then that’s probably a good start to getting some exercise and fitness.

The main thing I did today was work on the curriculum outlining for the university data engineering course that will be held in first semester of 2022. We’re at the stage of breaking each week’s lecture down into individual slides related to the subtopics within that week. The lecturer and I have taken about half the weeks each to break down like this, so I have about 4 or 5 to do. I completed two of them today, and wrote a brief note on one of the other.

For dinner I made a special treat: pasta with tomato sauce and burrata.

I actually split the burrata in two and shared it with my wife. Very decadent!

New content today:

Students, not comics

I planned today to work on a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! writing, since I don’t even have a new strip ready for Monday at this point. I ended up doing very little of that, because I had two ethics classes, plus spent a few hours helping university students with their image processing assignments for the final course assessment tasks.

I also went on a long walk with my wife and Scully, taking one of our usual long routes – a loop along streets and through parks, and then back along the shore of the harbour. I did a couple of bird counting lists using eBird, and on the second half of the walk I got up to 15 different species, which is a good high number – more than usual.

A couple of photos, from Friday, when walking Scully at the dog park I spotted this Australian brushturkey:

And yesterday near the pie shop where I got lunch is this extremely modest fish and chip shop:

I’ve never eaten there, so I can’t attest to whether the claim is true or not. Although I’ve seen some reviews which definitely imply that the claim is overblown.

New content today:

And a busy Friday to finish the week

Today I had to deal with questions from university students that I didn’t have time to handle last night. They stretched my knowledge a bit so it took a lot of time to handle them. I’d wanted to dedicate the day to writing comics and other such activities, but I only got a little of that done.

The other thing about today is that it was very hot. 33°C in the city, up to 34°C in some suburbs. It was the first real blast of heat as summer closes in. And windy – the sort of day with a strong hot wind blowing trees and leaves and pollen all over the place. That made it rather unpleasant being outside.

Tonight my wife is having a night out with her friends. I am looking after Scully, so I took her up the street to a burger place where we could sit outside while I ate. And while waiting for my food, my wife walked past with one of her friends! So Scully became super excited, because she loves that friend (having stayed with her for a couple of weeks while my wife and I were travelling). And then when I came home, Scully didn’t want to come with me – she wanted to go back to the restaurant where my wife always goes with her friends!

New content today:

Very quick Thursday update

I’ve been super busy this evening.

My day got off to a terrible start when 2 minutes before an online ethics class my Internet went out. I used 4G on my iPad to post an apology and that I had to cancel the class. I wasn’t set up to run Zoom on 4G, and I don’t know how long it would have taken me to download the client and get everything running. This was the class I had to cancel last week as well due to the ISO meeting I was in at the time, so the 4 students in this timeslot have now missed out 2 weeks in a row. It’s the first time since I started that I’ve had Internet issues during a class.

The outage was a scheduled maintenance window, as I discovered by looking it up. It could have occurred at any time between 7am and 3pm, though of course it happened right before my lesson was due to begin at 10am. After the net came back on half an hour later, I contacted the students to offer a make-up class at the same time tomorrow. Three of the four said they could make it, so I’ll be doing it then.

I mostly worked on Darths & Droids writing today. I’m very short on buffer and need to get more strips written for the next week.

This evening I had two more ethics classes, and in between I made sourdough and cooked dinner, and dealt with some student feedback on the image processing assessment task that I marked last week. That was quite a job, which I won’t go into further here. Let me just say that I thought I got off lightly during Monday’s tutorial session, when most of the students logged out after about an hour, so I didn’t have much to do for the next 2 hours – but now I’ve definitely earned my pay from the university this week. I also have a couple of outstanding requests for assistance in coding up some of the project work for the next assessment task, from two different teams.. I didn’t have time to get to that tonight, so will have to do it tomorrow morning as well.

New content today:

A long haul day

It was a busy day today. After the last week of ISO meetings and having deadlines for other things, I had two things I needed to get done today.

Firstly I started by making some Irregular Webcomic! strips, since without new ones the buffer would have run out today. I didn’t have time to write and photograph my usual batch of over 20 strips in one go, so I had to just write three strips to last until the end of this week, photograph them, assemble them, and write annotations for them. Fortunately I didn’t suffer any writers block and managed to get the whole lot done within a couple of hours. But that will only last until the weekend, and I’ll need to get another batch going in time for Monday.

After picking up Scully from my wife’s work at lunchtime, I brought her home via the slopey park again, where we did some ball fetching and lying in the grass for a bit. She was very good for me this afternoon when we finally got home, just sleeping in her dog bed until my wife arrived home from work.

This gave me time to work on the next thing – my ethics lesson for the new week of classes this evening. This week we’re talking about enhancing sports performance, in particular the ethics of performance enhancing drugs. We get there via a route starting with high altitude training – in which athletes live in mountains for several weeks while training, to increase their red blood cell count, which gives them an advantage when they return to lower altitudes. It’s a common (and legal) method that athletes have been using for many years. Then we go to low-oxygen tents, which simulate altitude training by let the athlete sleep in a low oxygen environment – it’s cheaper and easier and produces the same effect: higher red blood cell count. And it’s also legal in sports training.

Then we go onto blood doping – removing blood from an athlete, then a few weeks later transfusing the red cells back into the same athlete. This produces the same effect—increased blood cell count—just without the low-oxygen training. The result is exactly the same, but I ask the kids if it’s still acceptable.

And then we hit erythropoietin, or EPO. An artificial copy of a protein secreted by human kidneys, that regulates red blood cell production. If you inject it, you end up with more red blood cells. Again, the same result as altitude training, but by a different method. And the kids need to decide if this is okay or not. All the way along this path they need to justify their answers with explanations.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow, where I don’t have any hard deadlines for things I need to get done. I might even relax a little…

New content today:

Back to the office!

My wife that is, not me. Her office is opening up again after the long COVID lockdown here in Sydney, and she went in to work this morning for a full day (she did a single afternoon last week in preparation). And she took Scully back into the office for the first time in months. So I had the entire morning to myself!

I had the last class of the week on the ethics topic of Democracy. It was a bit tough because three of the students in this class are a bit slow to collect their thoughts and express them, while one of the kids is a fast thinker, so he gets a bit impatient. Fortunately though, the USA goes off daylight saving in a couple of weeks, which will split this class into two, with the US students moving an hour later, while the ones in Asia stay at the same time.

At lunch time I went to my wife’s office (a short walk away, which is good because she doesn’t need to use public transport while COVID is still going around) to pick up Scully and take her home for the afternoon. Scully likes being in the office with my wife, but she gets a bit stir crazy being in there all day, so I took her for a long walk before heading home.

We walked past Naremburn, a suburb about 2.5 km away that I walk to sometimes. There used to be a small bakery here, which made some okay meat pies and some good sweet treats, but it closed down maybe a year or so ago, leaving nothing much of interest in the small cluster of shops for me. (There’s a couple of cafes, but I don’t drink coffee. There’s a brewpub, but it’s not exactly the sort of place you can grab a bite to eat while walking home – though it is nice to sit in for a long lunch. And there’s a hairdresser and a dog groomer and a clothing shop.) Well, I was pleasantly surprised to discover today that a brand new bakery has opened in the same place as the old bakery! I peeked through the door and it looks like they have some nice things, so maybe later this week I’ll walk over here again before I eat lunch and I’ll have the chance to try some things.

This afternoon I tried to write some comics, but had a bad case of writer’s block, so didn’t get much done. And tonight was the second last tutorial session for the UTS image processing course. I had to help a few groups of students with their project work – several of them are discovering that the grand ambitions they had with their project specification reports are not so easy to turn into practice. I reassured them that the important thing was to adapt and learn, and report on the fact that they had to try something else because their initial plans didn’t work out. I think all the students I’m working with are pretty competent and doing decent work, so I hope that’s reflected in their final reports.

New content today:

Super busy week: Saturday

Today was the final day of the ISO Photography standards meeting, so I had to be up and ready to start by 7am again. The last day is easier as it’s administrative stuff and usually not technical discussion. In other business I suggested that we should establish formal liaison relationship with the W3C consortium, since they are doing work on defining a HTML canvas for display of HDR images, which is potentially overlaps with work we are doing on defining a format for HDR and wide colour gamut still images. We don’t want to be duplicating work, or worse, coming up with competing standards.

Once the meeting was over, I had to prepare for the 5th lesson of my course on Creative Thinking and game design. Because of student schedule changes it’s moved form Sunday to Saturday fo the final two weeks. I printed and cut out the Ruin the Wedding game, and played it a couple of times with my wife.

We discovered that it was far too easy to ruin the wedding, sending the bride home in disgust both times before most people even made it to the reception. There were also flavour issues with events written on the card that should really only happen at either the ceremony or the reception being playable when people were pretty much anywhere. So we brainstormed ways to fix these issues and the kids came up with some ideas that should work. I’ll make a new version of the game and we’ll do another round of playtesting and refining next week – and that’ll be the course done!

New content today: