Make your own: where programming is relevant, useful and fun

April 25, 2019

To learn programming, it’s best to have some real problems which need solving. This article looks at several examples of the applications I’ve created, and why.

Bett 2017 Bulletin #3

January 20, 2017

I know from past experience what next week at Bett will entail, so I've written a program to summarise it....

Recent book reviews

Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich -- Extended review

Nearly a hundred years after the Nazi phenomenon people are still asking the question: how could apparently ordinary or, in some cases, highly cultured, people commit such terrible crimes.

Education book reviews of 2024

This pdf contains the reviews of mine that were published in Teach Secondary magazine in 2024.

Review: How I review books on edtech

My views on what constitutes a book on edtech are fairly catholic. Indeed, it would me more accurate to denote the books I review as books for teachers of ICT, Computing, digital literacy etc etc,, rather than books on edtech. The latter tend to have titles like “How to teach Computing”, or “How to use Excel in the classroom”.

Review: Nuts and Bolts: How Tiny Inventions Make Our World Work

It's rather disconcerting when one considers that buildings like The Shard are essentially held together by nuts, bolts and washers.

Review: Love Triangle: The Life-changing Magic of Trigonometry

Like, I suspect, many people, I have never knowingly come across an isosceles triangle in my life, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did. However...

Review: Making Sense Of Chaos – A Better Economics for a Better World

Before you rush off on the grounds that this book has nothing to do with Computing, let me reassure you that it does.

Bjork & Bjork’s Desirable Difficulties in Action

The original work on which this volume is based has perhaps been honoured more in the breach than in the observance.

Review: Coderspeak – The language of computer programmers

This book won’t necessarily help a student pass a computing exam, but it will almost certainly make them a more aware, and thus better, programmer.

Review: Quiet Power, by Susan Cain

Introverts thrive by being allowed to be quiet, having time for reflection and not being required to 'perform' all the time.

Quick look: Desirable difficulties in action

The idea of desirable difficulties has always appealed to me. In my teaching I’m partticularly in favour of applying Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development.