Busier Days Ahead

It’s time to teach C++ programming again to the Year 1 students. It’s going to be tough and challenging. Students always seem to struggle in this area. Only a handful can grasp the concept of object-oriented programming. Most will be blur even until the end of the course! Seriously. It’s not easy to motivate students to learn programming – almost an impossible task. I hope that these students will put on their thinking cap more and show positive attitude in the learning. I will try to use different teaching methods to guide them. I have even planned an ice breaker for the first lesson, which starts on Wednesday. There will be a laboratory session on Friday.

Other than that, I will be lecturing the Soft Computing module to the Year 3 students. It’s another tough module as well. It covers topics like Neural Network, Fuzzy Logic and Genetic Algorithms. Hmm…I don’t wish to do any explanation here. To know more, perhaps you can check out the wikipedia.com. :p
Here are the links:

• Neural Network


• Fuzzy Logic


• Genetic Algorithm

More administration work is expected as this is the last half of the academic year which ends in June. There will be preparation of results, module reports, minutes of meeting, etc. Oh, I’m also supervising 5 final year projects:

i) Children Painting and Learning Tool
ii) Steganography for Data Transfer
iii) Multimedia Intelligent Tutoring System Authoring Tool
iv) C++ Code Generation Tool using JSP
v) 3-D Sign Language Teaching and Learning Tool

I find the second Project Title on Steganography interesting and it was actually proposed by the student himself. “Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the intended recipient knows of the existence of the message; this is in contrast to cryptography, where the existence of the message itself is not disguised, but the content is obscured.” (wikipedia.com). The message can be hidden in an image (Gif, Jpeg, etc), audio (mp3) or even video. The student will attempt to hide the message in an audio file, which is pretty challenging.

All of them need to propose a novel idea in the design and development of the tool. They also need to write a dissertation for the research and development work. Most of the time, I need to do a lot proof-reading for them. I just hope that they will be able to complete the project on time with a reasonable prototype and a good documentation.