Today I’m spending half the day at KTH, after having had a group discussion session with my PBL students. Personally, I like the programming sessions much better, it’s more fun to help students solve problems themselves than to question them to see if they’ve done their homework.
I’ve been programming for ten years and I used to help teaching programming for years when I was a student, so I tend to underestimate the amount of preparation needed for me. I always do the programming assignments beforehand as they’re new to me, but reading up on what the students are actually learning is something I’ve overlooked.
I’m programming a quite advanced Python application at the moment, so it’s easy for me to believe …
kth
Teaching
It's all Python!
Right now, it’s all about Python.
This week I started teaching again, entry level programming with problem based learning for KTH engineering students. I have my own group of 12 students who’ll (hopefully) be kick-ass programmers in a couple of months! … or at least know the basics of programming. :-)
A few years ago KTH switched from Java to Python in these courses, a very good decision if you ask me. No more “and please ignore that strange main-stuff, we’ll get to that later, for now just copy it”.
Python is clean and the students can get straight to actually writing code that does things. Very pedagogic:
Java Hello World:
public class Hello {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(“Hello World!”);
}
}
Python Hello World:
print “Hello World!”
But …
Not Having an Office
Being a freelance developer means often not having a job to physically go to. I love to be able to work from home, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s good to spend every day all by yourself. It’s hard to believe that anyone would stay sane for a longer period of time during these circumstances.
I don’t really want to go insane, so my plan is to spend not more than half of the estimated 40-hour-weeks at home. One afternoon a week I’ll be at Il Caffè, The Place To Be for freelancers here in Stockholm. When possible, I also plan to spend one day a week at my customers’ offices, even if most projects are of the type that …
Back at KTH!
Today I left my job for the last time. I’m now officially a freelance developer! I had the afternoon off, so I did what I’ve thought about doing for a while: visited KTH and CSC, where I used to hang out a lot a few years back.
Teaching is something I’ve been missing the last three years, so my plan was to see if I’m needed in any course. Turns out I am, I believe the exact words were “Yes yes yes!”.
So in January, I’m going back to teaching programming a few hours a week! It’ll be interesting, because I believe I’m a much better teacher now than when I was as a student. New perspectives, better understanding of people. But …
