Damien Costello - Vagrant Lecturer

The IMTC is happening on the first week of April in Dublin. More details can be found here. Here is a teaser that Craig Murphy has created for this conference. Craig is also one of the driving forces for DDD Ireland which is happening on May 3rd in GMIT - don't miss it.

As part of our course development, the Department of Mathematics & Computing at GMIT has run a week long course for second level students for the past number of years.  We call this course Digital Transitions.  It is aimed primarily at Transition Year Students and is designed to give them a taste of what life as a computing student can be like.

The week is spent in GMIT, mostly in one of our computer labs.  Features of the week include web design, multimedia work, digital photography, robotics or a combination of any of the above.  For students it is a chance to delve in a see some of the work behind the scenes.  To develop software that they may not have had the chance to work with before.  Many will not have had web design explained, or have had a chance to do work with Flash, Photoshop or other graphics packages. 

This year, we introduced a new element - Robotics.  Using the Lego Mindstorms kits, we created robots.  We built driving robots, creeping robots and even robots that walked upright.  Figuring out the gears, the pulley mechanisms and the mechanics involved can be tricky enough, and then the programming starts.  Luckily, with the Lego programming interface, the programmer can concentrate on the task in hand and not need to get too caught up in the semantics of any given language.  Separating this concept of functionality from language allows the students to concentrate on what the robot should do and the steps required to achieve that task.

Its part of the exploration of computing, building something and seeing the results, whether they be a robot or a web site.  Its a fun week, we build a simple website and the students upload pictures and information about their work for the week on this.  You can see what we did here.

As part of Ireland's Science & Technology Week, a group of 7-10 year olds were brought to GMIT by a parent/uncle/aunt to take part in a session of fun with the Lego Mindstorms kits.  The session was hosted by the Department of Mathematics & Computing on Friday 16th November.  For those of you who don't know, Lego Mindstorms NXT is a set of Lego that goes beyond the Lego Technics range.  Lego Technics introduces mechanics and gears, allowing you to build very realistic models of engines, cranes, race cars, motor bikes and pretty much most machines that you can imagine.  The Mindstorms range goes beyond this and adds a processor, some motors and some sensors.  This means that you can build a robot and then program it to interact with the world around you.

At 3pm, it began.  The looks of concentration, the careful reading of the instructions, determined chins, more determined hands searching for pieces and then building, reading, programming, making sure that the grabber grabs, the robot moves as specified in the challenge.  And if any of that fails, just moving the robot manually to see what it might do (if only the program worked).  throughout the two hours we were there, there were whoops of joy as the robots first moved forwards and backwards, then stopped when it hit a wall and turned around and went in the opposite direction, and finally, the ultimate, to pick up the ball in the grabber at the front of the robot.  That was the achievement, that was the moment that made it worth the time, the effort and the concentration.

And the 7-10 year olds had fun too!

So there we were on a pleasant Thursday afternoon, sitting in the largest lecture theatre in GMIT.  And why were we there?  To listen to Andy Wigley as he gave an insight into mobile applications development.  Being the MVP for Mobile Applications, he is probably best placed to given an introduction the 70 or so students of Computing and Engineering who attended this talk.   Explaining the difference between the devices available from smart phones to mobile PC's, he went on to explain the use of the Compact Framework and managed code for the development of the universal application "Hello World".

Practical demonstrations are always the best.  Andy worked through creating and deploying the application in Orcas, on several devices, showing how easy it is to program for touch screen or button functionality on smart phones.  The emulator makes it easy for the developer to see how the app will look and feel on different models and this makes for a smoother implementation.

You can find information on the .NET Compact Framework here.  This includes downloading and installing, and tutorials for developing with the framework, as well as technical articles.

It was fun, the possibilities for mobile development are limited only by our imagination and the pervasiveness of this technology has still to be explored fully.

You can have a look at some of the pictures here.  Thanks for the talk Andy.