Active STEM

This was my summer of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).  First, with Matt Amoroso as my TA,  I taught six workshops at Stevens for their ECOES (Exploring Career Opportunities in Engineering and Science) program.  The workshops were three hours, half lecture and half workshop. Workshops were with raspberry pis, a breadboard and exercises.  The programming language was Python.  The high school students had variable experience in computer science, only about a quarter were active programmers.  Nonetheless the labs worked well with some tuning through the summer.  A later post will discuss some of these experiences.

We reprised this experience at r00tz, a spin off  workshop at DEF CON, with mostly grade school students.  The labs held up, especially the first few, and it was nice to see parents becoming absorbed too.

I am making the labs available on my new homepage, aarphacker.com.  I am adding resources and code to this site over the next few weeks and will keep you posted on the progress.  You are free to use any materials on the site with attribution and the promise that if you improve it you wil let me know so I can incorporate it in future versions.  Later!

Death and Bits

I have posted a few blogs on how to prepare your digital property for your demise.  This includes surveying the large ebook providers, commenting on Google's excellent and ground breaking policy and referring you to articles discussing the topic. 

Well another article surfaced today that discusses the topic and how friends and relatives potentially can be in trouble for taking possession of your friend or relatives bits.  Anne Flaherty does a great job in her article, much of the information is complimentary to what has been discussed in this blog.  So take a look at it now or bookmark it to return when you need it.  I hope that day is far away!

I will continually come back to this topic and hope you find the compendium of articles, knowledge and research useful.

Next blog on my summer of STEM with pointers to all the materials.  Later!

Of Course(s)

I have been teaching courses for an Executive Master's in Technology Management at the University of Pennsylvania, EMTM, since 2004.  This is the last year of the program and I decided to provide all my class notes on the web.  The class notes are for three courses: Software engineering, security and privacy in IT and human computer interaction. They can be found at my personal web site.  I hope you find it useful.

Some statistics from my involvement int he program: taught 26 trimesters involving 126, 3 hour lectures.

I hope you enjoy the material.  More posts soon, I have a backlog finally.  Later!

Pi Eyed

Worked on a few kits this weekend from my kickstarter collection.  This one was PiRingo another flashing lights board.

  I am doing this a bit more earnestly since I am teaching a  summer STEM course for high school students on using python to do Internet of Things stuff using Raspberry Pis.
I am appreciating RPi.GPIO, although the lower case i, is a source of error, even though it is cute.
It i sonly 3 hours and I have to teach them the python logic to work the boards so it is going to be more tweaking the code.  Can do light sensing and temperature sensing (and of course the blinking lights) but should I even attempt anything mobile?  I would appreciate any suggestions and will post what I finally do.

Also stumbled across Ren'Py today, a "Visual Novel Engine."  It is strange enough to give it a look.  I will report on that and I owe you one on lua, I have been side tracked by a machine learning tool in lua, Torch7 and am trying to get my arms around it.  For all the apt-gets and brews in the world, some things are still just damn hard to install!

More soon.  I just soldered my first surface mount for a DocJava audio processing shield.    It is not pretty but I think it will work.  Later!

Gone Fishing

This weekend I did a quick raspberry pi i/o kit, the fish dish from Pi Supply.  Not one of my best soldering jobs but it works.  It is a nice, elementary and cheap shield to test using the i/o ports of the raspberry pi.   The board has an elementary speaker, LEDs and a button.  The test program that a user submitted uses python and its RPi.GPIO library, very straightforward on the Raspberry Pi.  The kit is less than $15 and will be out soon.  Mine was delivered early since I supported the kickstarter that launched it.

One caution is that it seems that the latest NOOBS version of Raspberry Pi really needs more than a 4 gig SD card,  I advise 8 or 16 gig.  Now I am wondering whether python scripts or arduino sketches will be my i/o software of choice.  For most embedded projects the arduino will win due to its size and the final will be in C and not in sketches.

So when does one stay pat with the programming languages they know?  Well I am 62 and still want to learn new languages!  I am wondering whether Dart should be next.  Any opinions?  Later!

Christmas Sparks

I had some time to play with my newest chunk of hardware, the spark core.  It is a sweet little board embedded in a breadboard for prototyping fun.  It also connects to Wi-Fi and has a cloud to support it.  You can read about it here.  Of course a picture is warranted:

Registration begins with a smart phone app that assists in Wi-Fi registration, much like chromecast but not as smooth.  Nonetheless it did connect after some handstands - hint you need WPA-2 not WEP and this finally moved me to upgrade my home network!  It is a good thing. 

The spark core folks include in their smart phone app tinker which lets you do elementary operations on the pins.  You can flash an led from your iPhone and more.

More on hacking with it later in the week.  Later, and Merry Christmas!

Killer UX

I just got finished reading Killer UX Design by Jodie Moule.  (Please note that O'Reilly provided a copy of this for free through their review program, which I recommend by the way.)  The book has several features that make it ideal for someone who is interested in usability or has been doing it for a few years.  What is unique about this book is that it provides a very comprehensive case study and weaves it into a thorough usability process.  This book is a great complement for more encyclopedic books such as Designing the User Interface or User Interface Design and Evaluation.  At the end an app, cook,  is produced and I actually downloaded it from Apple's app store.

The book takes the reader through the process using the app to illustrate the steps in the process: Research, Insight, Concept and Design.  Throughout she provides sage advice on when to delve deeper and when to let it go.  She also focuses on behavior and behavior change.  A quote from page 125:

Based on what we know about the users and the environment, what does a [new way of living and behaving] look like?

This illustrates the constant strong emphasis on behavior change and not just cranking out an app.  The book is lavishly illustrated and I do recommend it highly especially for folks interested in usability or in their early years.  Do not get it if you want a comprehensive survey of Usability.  Do get it if after reading the comprehensive books listed above you want to then actually focus on usability in your next project.

Bottom line is that I do highly recommend it.  In fact, I am going to use it in my HCI class in 2014.
It has been a while sicn eI posted on this site, hope to do better!  Later.

(cross posted - also on my Software Universe blog)