My personal goals for this year are to gain meaningful employment and develop my skills and knowledge further.
Education and CPD
I intend to keep my CPD updated, keep attending courses and keep networking with people so people know who I am and what I am doing. I also intend to keep learning with OpenLearn and other platforms.
Employment
My goal is to find employment that will make use of my current skill set and experience. Even if this is just a few hours to begin with. It should open up further opportunities.
Volunteer work
STEM Ambassador
I hope to be undertaking more assignments as a STEM ambassador.
Code Club
Hopefully this will keep going, keep developing and attracting new attendees.
Tech Jam
Hopefully 2020 will see a boost in numbers. This will also increase the knowledge base available to other attendees.
Torbay Trojans
Football season does not start until about April. I anticipate being back on the side line helping out with the officiating, and the team generally.
AI statement : Consent is NOT granted to use the content of this blog for the purposes of AI training or similar activity. Consent CANNOT be assumed, it has to be granted.
E-safety Website
As I have been attending seminars on e-safety, I decided to try and collate some of what I have been learning and combine this with some of my knowledge of programming websites such as:-
Scratch
Repl.it
My idea is to try and develop a resource which lists benefits, potential risks of using these websites. As these sites have a collaborative element to them.
This is still work in progress, but getting there slowly. I am using the programming website repl.it for this project.
Hopefully, I can eventually share this with people. The benefits of being able to ask for help and have other programmers help you are clear.
I hope through this project that I can share my experience and help others stay safe, ask question in the right way and consider responses to those questions carefully.
I would also hope this demonstrates, some of the skills I am learning and helps me gain meaningful employment.
AI statement : Consent is NOT granted to use the content of this blog for the purposes of AI training or similar activity. Consent CANNOT be assumed, it has to be granted.
Blender Open Movie Project
The Blender Open Movie project archive, now has 10 movies to watch and enjoy. These can be found on the project website.
These are very high quality pieces of work, they also demonstrate how powerful Blender is. This is really good promotion as to what can be achieved with free software.
AI statement : Consent is NOT granted to use the content of this blog for the purposes of AI training or similar activity. Consent CANNOT be assumed, it has to be granted.
Cassiopeia is a constellation in the Northern Hemisphere. In this article I hope to cover some of the interesting objects that can be found in this region of space.
The constellation is recognisable from the fact it has a W shape. Cassiopeia can be found near to Perseus and Andromeda.
You can download a starmap (taken from Kstars) here
For the purpose of this article I will be using the K-stars package.
Principle Stars
These appear in Kstars. I have set the software to display objects fainter than Magnitude (m) 5.0.
The constellation also has many objects such as open clusters.
The Owl Cluster (NGC 457) is close to the star $\varphi$ Cassiopeiae.
There are no galaxies within the constellation but star $\zeta$ Cassiopeiae (3.7m) appears to be the closest to the Andromeda Galaxy (M31).
You can see the milkyway behind the constellation. This could explain the number of open clusters in the region. However this is more speculation as I am not an expert on this.
AI statement : Consent is NOT granted to use the content of this blog for the purposes of AI training or similar activity. Consent CANNOT be assumed, it has to be granted.
This blog post has been ported from my old blog site.
If you’re looking for a new online course to take, you’re in luck. 200 universities have launched 620+ free online courses. Here’s the full list, by
@dhawalhshah
This is well worth checking out. All this learning and knowledge is now at the fingertips of everyone which is great for knowledge sharing and improving the skills of many people all over the world.
AI statement : Consent is NOT granted to use the content of this blog for the purposes of AI training or similar activity. Consent CANNOT be assumed, it has to be granted.
Chemistry Help
I came across this website on the Fediverse as part of a thread on science. I had a look and it appears to be something could really help anyone studying Chemistry
A discussion that mentioned Atomic Orbitals led me to this page on the above website. This site has some nice simulations of topics that are included in the A'level Chemistry Syllabus.
There is also a website with a nice forum on science that I found too. This has a section on Chemistry and then sub forums for Organic, Inorganic and Physical chemistry.
$\LaTeX$ may also be of interest to Chemistry students as you can type set Chemical Formulae etc.
In a sort of related topic, I found a useful site that gives tips on technical writing, I am familiar with some of the ideas presented here, well mostly Constructivism by Jerome Bruner from studying the Supporting Learning in Primary Schools course with the Open University.
I am trying to follow some of this idea when writing instructional blog posts. Provide information on how I do things but put quite a lot of emphasis on the reader actually going away and researching topics. Everyone's system and circumstances are different.
AI statement : Consent is NOT granted to use the content of this blog for the purposes of AI training or similar activity. Consent CANNOT be assumed, it has to be granted.
AI statement : Consent is NOT granted to use the content of this blog for the purposes of AI training or similar activity. Consent CANNOT be assumed, it has to be granted.
Wearable Tech 2020
BP has launched the sixth instalment of the Ultimate STEM Challenge national competition in partnership with STEM Learning.
The Ultimate STEM Challenge is back again and with an added focus of Wearable Tech. Wearable technology is all around us in our everyday lives, from smart watches that monitor our health to smart jewellery that is fashionable and makes communication easier. BP is challenging pupils aged 9-14 to design a new piece of wearable tech that will improve lives in the future.
AI statement : Consent is NOT granted to use the content of this blog for the purposes of AI training or similar activity. Consent CANNOT be assumed, it has to be granted.
The first Code Club of 2020 went really well. Today we were up to six. So people are starting to come back after the Christmas Holiday.
Today, we undertook some more work on the website that we have been working on. We also undertook an hour of code activity, my aim is to try and get lots of people having a go at this, you get a certificate at the end.
More Scratch 3.0 coding, which is great and a good starting point before moving on to other programming languages.
Rocksndiamonds. which I hope we can eventually use to learn level layout.
AI statement : Consent is NOT granted to use the content of this blog for the purposes of AI training or similar activity. Consent CANNOT be assumed, it has to be granted.
KSTARS is a Linux based astronomy package. For a free software package it has a lot of features and downloadable catalogues of stellar objects.
When you first load up the package you may want to view the constellation lines. I worked out how to do this, but am including some info below to help users change the line colour from the default light grey as it may be easier for people to see the lines.
If you click on
Settings (menu) —> configure —> guides
You should get the following
I have checked the boxes to constellation:-
lines
boundaries.
names
If you then click on the colours tab at the side
I have set the colour to yellow. This does stand out, probably a little too much. However you can set it to the colour of your choosing or leave as the default grey.
AI statement : Consent is NOT granted to use the content of this blog for the purposes of AI training or similar activity. Consent CANNOT be assumed, it has to be granted.
