Three Thing Game Starts

Perhaps the best way to make sure you do well in Three Thing Game

The competition started today. Find out more here.  Pictures  here.

Dragon for a day

- what would you do with this?

I got to be a dragon today. For a little while. Elliot, one of our final year students, is doing one a module which is all about teaching computing in schools. He had the neat idea of asking Emma to show our HIVE Immersive Visualisation Suite to his group and then getting them to pitch business plans based on the technology they’d seen.

And he needed some dragons for the pupils to pitch to. Which is where I came in. So today we got to see the presentations.

Most impressive. Virtual golf on a cruise ship, using motion capture to sell fashion, 3D mapping for fire safety and the winner, an immersive take on driving lessons.

All presented with enthusiasm and not a little business acumen. To say that this was probably the first time these folks had presented to an audience in this way they did a very impressive job. As I said at the time, make sure that when you are telling people the things that you have done you mention you’ve done stuff like this. Great stuff.

Hull Computer Science Blogs

I tell all my students to start a blog. Not because they’ll instantly get loads of readers, or because the world necessarily cares much what they think right now (sad but true) but because it is good practice for writing.

Writing is important. It is how we tell people stuff. Being good at writing is a really useful skill to have. And like any skill it gets better if you practice. I’ve been blogging for the thick end of 10 years or so (and I do mean the thick end). I’ve set myself the goal of writing something different every day and I’ve mostly kept at it. It has made me much better at writing. I can turn out a few hundred words really quickly now if I need to. And the words make a lot more sense than when I started. Or as I used to say “Sense words make much more now. Want cookie.”

The lovely thing is that quite a few Hull students have taken my advice to heart and even got together to bring you all their stories in one big chunk of blogging goodness. If you head over to http://hullcompsciblogs.com/ then you can see what they are up to.

I hope they all keep at it. Starting a blog is easy. Keeping it going is the hard part. You don’t need to write every day, but you do need to have writing as part of your routine. And when you do something, even if it is just go see a movie, try to put down a piece that sets out what you thought about it. And keep an eye out for things to write about. As I always say:

“What doesn’t kill you makes a darned good blog post.”

Sorry about this

Update on Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 07:40PM by Rob

Years ago I did this blog post along the lines of "If you aren't finding shelfish particularly relaxing you may have bought the 'Little Book of Clam' by mistake." Every since then I've been tickled by the way you can swap two letters round and get a lovely, absurd, result. Then, in the Programming 2 Lecture today one of the students had a "Keep Calm and Carry On" T-Shirt, and I knew how I was going to spend my lunch hour......

Media Magnet

Jake Zukerman of BBC Look North sets up Lindsay for another take….

In between all the lectures and labs and other stuff for today we had BBC Radio Humberside drop by for a chat with some of our students and then BBC Look North came by to find out more about Three Thing Game and Platform Expo. The radio session was a hoot. Steve Redgrave (someone I’ve known since before he was famous) came along and did a storming interview with a bunch of our First Year students who told him all about the joys of studying Computer Science at Hull.

The filming was fun too, although I never know where to put my eyes when someone is taking video of me. If I look at the camera I worry about seeming too intense, and if I look around I worry about seeming too shifty. And then there is the vexed question of which is my best side….

Anyhoo, it all passed off well enough. Yesterday we had a reporter and a photographer from the Hull Daily Mail come to see us and today I was delighted to find that the article had made it to print, with a great picture of some of our students and some quotes from a bloke referred to as “Rob Mile”. I’ll take that as close enough..

Later on Darren did a very good session about PS Suite, which is the new Sony game development they will be releasing later this year. We’ve got special permission for our students to use it in the Three Thing Game competition, and Stuart Lovegrove of Sony Studios in Liverpool will be taking a look at the things that they have made.

All gripping stuff. And then tonight I’ve managed to build a Gadgeteer device that can talk to my Eggbot. Exciting times.