Yesterday saw the conclusion of the 2007 iteration of the National Computer Science School. The NCSS is a week long event held at the University of Sydney that sees a cohort of 70-odd senior high school students from around Australia (some from as far away as Broome) develop a search engine and web site from scratch. That’s right, a search engine, fully featured with crawler, indexer, stemmer, stop lists and recursive descent query parser. It’s a truly amazing feat considering that the implementation language for the search engine is Python, a language which most of the students have not used before.
My involvement revolves around a series of four lectures that I give to the students involved in designing the web site hosting the search engine, in which I cover topics such as:
- The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future
- HTML: Semantics and validation
- CSS: Joy from the separation of content and presentation
- Accessibility: Making the web truly world wide
On the Thursday night of the school we hold a programming competition over two hours where students break up into teams of three to tackle a series of programming and web design questions. Scott and Matt from Atlassian were kind enough to volunteer as mentors for the night. The mentor’s role during the competition is to provide encouragement and direction to the team that they are assigned to as well as to discuss career options within the IT industry. It was particularly awesome to see Scott and one of his students working feverishly with pen and paper (and later a laptop) over dinner, discussing how to implement a recursive descent parser.
The event culminates in an all night work-a-thon on the Friday night where students and tutors stay up all night to complete their work followed by a presentation to parents and the client the next day. This is the most satisfying part of the experience for teachers and tutors as we get to sit back and enjoy the efforts of these talented students. I was absolutely thrilled to see students using fully CSS based layouts for their web site designs. One team even managed to add a touch of AJAX to their search form with search suggestions as you type, with no input from me I might add!
Huge congratulations are in order for Drs. James Curran and Tara Murphy whose tireless efforts every year are critical to the success of this event and to the many tutors who attend to guide their teams through the grueling program that is the NCSS.
Comments
4 responses to “NCSS 2007”
Hey Chris,
finally found your blog! Thanks for doing an awesome job at the summer school again this year. Here are some comments from the kids’ feedback forms:
‘I knew some of the content Chris was talking about, but it was still interesting to see it put in a different way than what I was used to seeing.’
“I did not attend any lectures of Chris’ this year although, whenever I inquired about anything to do with web design he proved knowlegable and returned with an answer swiftly.”
“I attended all Chris’s lectures and found them very easy to understand Chris took time to explain everything well”
“Chris’s lectures were very good. He explained everything clearly and he used his projector to good effect”
“Chris gave a good overall lecture and covered a good range of information relating to website design. The information and afterwards consulting were very helpful.”
“Chris is extremely knowlegable in his field…”
and the classic:
“Chris’s lectures were soft and comfy seated”
I bet you’re embarrassed now, so I’ll stop there… 🙂
I pride myself on knowing how to use my projector (ooer!)
Hey Chris it is Cameron Whiting one of the students in your lectures thanks for all the help with CSS and HTML our group (G3 Snake Pythons) really benefited from it i would like to stay in contact if thats ok so if i need further help for either career or web needs ill contact u ok by for now
Hi Cameron,
I’m glad to hear that and you can always reach me by email at mail at christopherowen dot id dot au