Learning by Doings

[Peter Law]

Hi,

A while back I did some posts and hangouts on various things in SR.
I'd like to start doing these again, but with a twist.

Before we get any new recruits, I'd like to give any existing
BlueShirts the opportunity to find out about all our things. As a
result, when the newbies arrive, everyone will be better able to help
them use our systems.

I'm therefore proposing to run some Google Hangout based activities to
help people learn about various things.
The way I see these running is:
* You pick a subject area
* I find something that needs doing in that area, or which would use that tool
* We work on it together in the (distributed) Doing
* You submit it (via review if needed)
* PROFIT

The benefit of this mechanism is two-fold: you get to learn about
something and SR gets some task done.

With that in mind, I've started flagging some trac tickets which are
suitable to be picked up by someone with minimal experience in a topic
area. These have the keyword "newbie", and can be searched for as such
[1].

If this model proves successful, the list of items could easily be
expanded and applied and the doings run with new recruits.

So, the question is: what do you want to learn about?

Thanks,
Peter

PS: When are university exams?

[1] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/query?keywords=~newbie&status=!closed

[Christopher Hewett]

On 20 May 2014 20:51, Peter Law <peter...@gmail.com> wrote:

PS: When are university exams?

Sotons is up to the 31st

[Murray Colpman]

On 20/05/14 20:51, Peter Law wrote:
> PS: When are university exams?

Now. I think for another week after this week for most people (not me)
as well.

Murray.

[Sophia Maria]

Exams go at least until the 4th of June.

[Tyler Ward]

Officially Southampton exams continue until the 7th of June[1]
although most people will be finished before then.

[1] http://www.southampton.ac.uk/studentadmin/assessment/examtimetables/examdates/

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[Peter Law]

I wrote:
>> PS: When are university exams?

Various Southampton people wrote:
> NOW!

Ok, thanks. Let's come back to this in a few weeks.

Thanks,
Peter

[Peter Law]

Hi,

I wrote:
> A while back I did some posts and hangouts on various things in SR.
> I'd like to start doing these again, but with a twist.

*exams occurred*

Now that everyone's exams are over and the related partying is
(presumably) coming to an end, I thought it was probably time to pick
this up again.

One area I'd sort of already started looking at was Badger, our
server. This was primarily because it needs updating to the latest
Fedora, and there are a number of things which need to occur to it
before we can do that. Since many of these things are actually pretty
simple to do, they make reasonable candidates as introductory tasks.

If this is an area of interest, I'll probably be running something
badger related soon. In the mean-while, my earlier badger intro
activity [1] has hopefully resulted in an easier to follow setup
instructions, so you should be able to get going on your own.

If there's something else you'd like to look at, let me know.

Thanks,
Peter

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/srobo/FQUDFRjiTuE/discussion

[Harry Cutts]

Hi,

On Tuesday, 20 May 2014 20:51:58 UTC+1, PeterJCLaw wrote:

I'm therefore proposing to run some Google Hangout based activities to
help people learn about various things.

The first thing that comes to mind is the software which will run on the ODROIDs (the boards which will replace the BeagleBoards) and tablets. The interfaces which currently run on the power board will have to be rewritten in HTML5, potentially a newbie-friendly topic. The basic stuff (e.g. viewing logs) will have to be done before we get newbies, of course, but the Manual Control Interface will need rewriting as well, which I think newbies could do.

This is a bit different from other topics (like Badger) in that the platform isn't ready to work on yet, but once it is (at least as a prototype), I think a Hangout on it would be very helpful.

Harry Cutts

[Peter Law]

Harry wrote:
> The first thing that comes to mind is the software which will run on the
> ODROIDs (the boards which will replace the BeagleBoards) and tablets.

Cool. Have we confirmed the specs of the boards we're using? (for some
reason I thought there were still two in contention?)

This isn't an area I've any previous experience with, so someone else
would need to lead these activities. I would, however, be most
interested in taking part in them.

Thanks,
Peter