Week 306

We did another 4-day week at FutureLearn, but switched our non-FutureLearn day to Tuesday in order to host *.club meetings.

FutureLearn

The team have been very welcoming and I’m enjoying getting back into the project.

Since we’ve been back, FutureLearn have put on an impressive number and breadth of talks with both internal and external speakers. Unfortunately I missed the talk on Monday by Martha Lane-Fox, but I did make it to Makoto Inoue’s talk on Thursday, “A video player for learning”.

He started by talking about his experience with taking courses on various MOOC platforms which I thought contained some fascinating insights. He then moved on to show us a couple of his own video-related projects: Benkyo Player for real time subtitle search and StepUp for micro-curation of video.

GFR

At lunchtime on Tuesday we hosted the inaugural meeting of the London XYZW Club at GFRHQ. At the meeting Ben G did an impressive and illuminating walkthrough of a simple 3D renderer which he’d built using three.js and “a bit of maths”.

That evening we also hosted the London Computation Club at which chapter two of the NAND2TETRIS book was discussed. I thoroughly enjoyed working through the exercises together on the projector with Jamie White writing HDL code in vim to satisfy the tests run on the Hardware Simulator. Thanks, Jamie!

On Wednesday evening we had a relatively quiet, but nonetheless enjoyable monthly drinks session at the Red Lion in Hoxton where we put the world to rights.

Until next time.

– James