First Week of Class

Classes kind of started last week. I found out on Monday at 10 AM that the first class was scheduled for 11 AM. In spite of the short notice, 7 out of 30 students showed up and we started an informal lecture and discussion. The first week has students registering and arriving after coming up with the funds for tuition. It is hard to go to far with only part of the class present. The students were very interested in programming and were concerned that a course in Software Engineering that was supposed to be offered was not. They wanted me to teach that class also because they knew I had been doing software development and felt the course was important for them to have.

The next class was scheduled for Thursday morning at 8 AM and I showed up late because I was told that classes were not really starting this week but there were students waiting for me so we started a lecture. I had now seen 14 students out of 30. On Friday, I went to the computer lab to try to update the Moodle site for the course and prepare the computers for compiling C programs. The class is scheduled for the computer lab so that we can spend time working on programming. There are about 10 working computers so we will work in groups of 3. This will give me a good chance to see how the students are doing by watching them write programs. The lab filled up with about 8 students and I looked over and a couple of them were looking up C programming on their own. I had one computer set up with a compiler so we did a little demo to show them how to run a program and the students were very attentive. The computers in the lab are very locked down with student access limited to their flash drives. The virus problem is pretty severe here (both computer and human) and I do not plan to share flash drives on my computer. The students in IT do have computers at home so I prepared a CD with the files they need to program there that I will distribute at class this week.

I have been impressed with the attitude of the students I have met. They seem to really want to learn and are fun to talk to. Some of the students are also planning some kind of science demonstration event and I will work with them on that. I brought some Chemistry and Physics hands on lab experiment books that we can get ideas from.

The Finnish professor, Matti Tedre, who started the IT program came in this week and will be here for 3 weeks. For the next phase he will be here the first term of each school year and will return to Finland or Sweden for the second term at the University. (He is probably moving to University of Stockholm). Matti's research is IT education in developing countries and he is committed to the program here. We are going to dinner tonight and it is nice to have him here for my orientation to the program.