Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Education

I will teach Software Architecture

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I’ve decided to teach Software Architecture at MSc level (hurray!). This is the first time of my life I’m going to teach at that level and (believe it or not) I’m looking forward to it.

Teaching at Masters level is somewhat different from teaching at Bachelor level. For one, the students are more mature and therefore more autonomous. No need for me to read my slides to them anymore.

A second difference is that an MSc is research oriented. As the result, the students are expected to read research papers and discuss about their possible implications. Obviously, this also means that I’ll have to read tons of papers and select those which are really relevant.

I’m not a novice in Software Architecture. In fact, I’m not bad at all… but I’ve bought the two following books because (i) both are excellent (ii) both are recent and (iii) both are available cheaply in the Low Price Edition of Pearson Education (i.e. I might use them as textbooks)

Applying UML and Patterns is written by Craig Larman. This book has earned rave reviews on Amazon and is recommended by people like Alistair Cockburn (one of the fathers of the Agile Manifesto), Martin Fowler (of Refactoring fame) and John Vlissides (one of the Gang of Four and who has just passed away). I’ll start reading it today and I’m sure it’s a hell of a good book on Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. By the way, up to now my favourite book on OOA and OOD is Grady Booch‘s Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications. In some weeks, I’ll tell you which one is better…

The second book is Software Architecture in Practice by Len Bass, Paul Clements and Rick Kazman. To be frank, I do not know those authors and I’ve bought this book because it has got rave reviews on Amazon with appreciations going from “Practical, readable, excellent” to “A Bible for Software Architects”. Part one is on envisioning architecture (the architecture business cycle, what is software architecture?), part two is on creating an architecture (quality, design, documentation), part three is on analyzing architectures and part four is on large-scale architectures. I’m sure to learn a lot from that book!

Listen to Cambridge…

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While perusing Monday’s edition of L’Express, I came across two interesting news items.

Cambridge teaches us how to teach and learn

For a long time, we, Mauritians, have studied by “doing” past-papers. We do that at CPE level, SC level, at HSC level and, perhaps, at University level.

This is bad according to Cambridge International Examinations of the University of Cambridge. In this L’Express article , CIE says:

“[…] le recours massif aux questionnaires des éditions précédentes serait anti-pédagogique. Selon le MES et CIE, cette pratique inciterait à  apprendre par coeur au lieu de véritablement connaitre le sujet examiné.”

Now I understand why some University students still try (sorry, it’s not possible to do that at tertiary level…) to learn what we teach them by heart. Heck, some students try to learn C or Java programs by heart. It’s because that’s how they have (more or less) always learned.

We need to do something in Year I to address that. We need to introduce some kind of “How to learn and succeed at University” module!

Poor, poor Mrs Toorab

Another beautiful article caught my eye.

It is an article on this pathetic decision of the Ministry of Education to ask all primary teachers to use correction fluid (tippex, blanco, …) to “correct” prescribed books used by 5 years old kids where it is said that one Mrs Toorab is wearing a swimming suit.

The books are then supposed to be checked by the school master who has to send a report to the Ministry.

I don’t like this situation at all. Instead of focussing and wasting resources on such trivial issues, the Ministry should focus its energy to understand what CIE is telling us and how far we are from a good (I’m not saying perfect) education system and do something about it.

Mauritius is small. We don’t have oil or gold. We only have our brains. It’s a crime to destroy the creativity of thousands of little Mauritians every year with our poor education system. And it’s killing our economy too.

About the first photo

This is a photo of Stephen Hawking that I found in an article in National Geographic.

In the photo, he is having fun in a zero gravity plane (i.e. he is experiencing something that astronauts feel – weightlessness) even though he is almost completely paralyzed…

He is one of the greatest scientist and philosopher living today. I am a big big fan of him. I even have two of his books.

He is currently the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

I suppose he didn’t study by “doing” Cambridge past-papers when he was younger :-)

PS: I’ll talk of AJAX in my next post :-)