Being a PhD student, I usually have a fair amount work to do. The vast majority of it can be found on this page, there is my PhD, my publications, and the reviewing I do. I also teach the occasional module, and may supervise projects. I also supervised the maynooth entry to the Robocode tournament for first years. I am the current organiser of the Postgraduate Seminar Series in the maynooth.
My PhD is rather cryptically entitled "The synthesis and Analysis of Student Profiling in Adaptive Learning Environments". I am undertaking this research under the excellent supervision of Dr. J.Paul Gibson (NUI Maynooth). It is early days yet, but at the moment I am looking at the following topics.
Whilst the above topics may seem reasonably theoretical and airy, I will be developing software as part of my doctorate (I dont wear sandals, in case you're wondering). My eventual goal is to create a teaching tool for a programming language that will side step or solve the problems currently resident in the teaching of programming. Currently I am working on automated assessment, i.e. automatically creating questions and testing students with them. If you are at all interested in this and would like to discuss it further, please contact me.
From time to time I like to write opinion, instead of scientifically grounded work. It is somewhat liberating write pieces without going through the usual process of read-review-cite. I have just started this hobby, hopefully it will be of use to others. Read my weblog on computer science education.
I have been reviewing papers for the PPPJ conference since 2003 and am currently registered to review for the upcoming ITiCSE and SIGCSE conferences.
In the academic year 2004-2005 I am lecturing CS211 which is tentatively titled "Advanced Data Structures and GUI Programming with Java". The CS211 course website contains all the necessary information.
I am supervising one final year project for students undertaking computer science. The project is to develop a tool that can be used as both a debugger and an educational tool. I will act as co-supervisor on this project, with Paul Gibson . This project has been undertaken by a 4th year science student Ger Deasy. For more information , see the project page .
I am one of the people responsible for the robocode programme being run in NUI Maynooth, robocode is a package developed by the good people at IBM that enables programmers to write AI for their own robots, and battle them against each other.
In Maynooth we intend to run a robocode tournament for all first year students, to give them a chance to flex and develop their progamming muscles in a fun and educational environment. For more information on robocode see the robocode page I put together. Having finished 3rd in the National Competition in 2004, we , at maynooth, feel compelled to enter once again and hopefully improve our performance.
My fourth year thesis was entitled "The development of a automated testing tool for teaching Computer Theory". It was developed under the supervision of Tom Naughton (to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude). It was during the development of this tool that I unearthed a huge interest in e-Learning. This eventually led to me undertaking a phD, which is basically where I am today.