Teaching in Hong Kong, Day 4

We were back in the classroom today and the overall plan was to talk about some teaching materials that I’d put on-line already on programming network-based applications. (A lot of work has gone into making it easier for people to write programs that talk across the network and it’s really useful to write these programs for practice because it exposes students to all of the problems that occur when an application spans more than one machine.)

Rather than just walk the students through some slides, I made it pre-reading and then asked them to produce a very small example that sent communication from one machine to another. We had some really interesting results – everyone had been working on it and had something to show, although a couple of people had discovered that trying to add features just before a demo can make a the demo a little less ‘demonstrative’ than it might otherwise have been. The demo code showed a lot of humour and also a high level of the understanding of the problems.

This led into discussion of why certain protocols work the way that they do and, in many cases, it’s because people wrote things that would work for the network of the ’70s and ’80s. These days, with the Web, video streaming and on-line gaming, we have different requirements in many senses and now that the students have written some code and tried some things, they’re ready to start thinking about the “whys” and the “hows” and, most importantly, the “what nexts” of the network.

It wasn’t a long day as the amount of work that had gone into the programs reduced the amount of time I had to spend explaining concepts (funny, that). After a quick design workshop on what the next assignment should look like, where everyone took part in forming ideas as to how we would build it, we broke early to give people more time to work on what they wanted to do.

Goodness – work done early leads to extra time for tasks later? Who thought that would ever work!

I’ve been trying to get a good picture of the Run Run Shaw Science Building, which is far more striking than it ever is in my photos, so here’s one I found on Wikimedia. It gives you some idea of the striking nature of CUHK – buildings nestled among the trees on the hillside.

The glorious colours of the Run Run Shaw Science Building. It dominates the CUHK vista from the MTR station.