Peter J. Kootsookos

Peter J. Kootsookos

Need to do FUN STUFF! Oz/Irish/US engineer, currently living in the USA. Married, one dog 🐶, one cat 🙀, two kids, and three passports.

Posts by Category

australia

capstone

Capstone projects

2 minute read

Published:

Capstone projects are a project that senior students (final year students) take on to showcase the skills they’ve learnt in their degree. Sometimes this is called Senior Design Project.

coding

Coding style

2 minute read

Published:

Coding style is a matter of taste.

cybersecurity

Cybersecurity 101

3 minute read

Published:

An administrator of a large organization that I do some work for recently sent an email trying to find someone who’d made an inappropriate purchase. The email was CC-ed to over 190 people. So I thought I’d write today about some simple things that you can do with respect to email.

data structures

Teaching Java and C++

2 minute read

Published:

The Data Structures course I’m teaching this semester is using both Java and C++ as the language of instruction. The students have more experience in Java than in C++.

Following instructions

3 minute read

Published:

One of my recent programming assignments in my Data Structures course included these instructions for an assignment.

Scaling applications

5 minute read

Published:

Cloud services make creating new, scalable applications very easy, at a cost.

Coding style

2 minute read

Published:

Coding style is a matter of taste.

Analyzing queues

5 minute read

Published:

During my Data Structures class we are soon to look at the FIFO: a queue. So I thought it might be fun to look at some queuing theory, not the data structures but how queues are modeled.

Divide and conquer

4 minute read

Published:

Donald Knuth, is a professor emeritus at Stanford University in Computer Science. In text, he wrote one of the most influential series of books called The Art of Computer Programming. While he was writing those books, he discovered typography and text layout and wrote TeX, the “word processing” system that many computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers use for their writings — though I, like many others, use a simplified version of it called LaTeX.

In-class exercises

3 minute read

Published:

Yesterday, I had my first class (times three sections) of the data structures course I’m teaching this semester at Fairfield. The class didn’t talk much about data structures, as it was mostly background and process related things. I like to spend some in-class time (“synchronous” time) going through part of the class syllabus, so that the students at least see it once.

Using GitHub Classroom

5 minute read

Published:

There is always a tension in academia, particularly in computer science, between teaching the theory and teaching the practice. Theoretical computer science is largely mathematical; practical computer science… isn’t.

facebook

fairfield

COVID testing

4 minute read

Published:

COVID-19 is still running rampant through the United States, at higher levels than in the initial peak. So why am I OK with going back to in-person teaching?

feet

life skills

Starting projects

3 minute read

Published:

This semester, I’ve been taking the Capstone I students at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) through their paces.

Embrace cancel culture

3 minute read

Published:

Cancel culture is getting many headlines recently, so I thought I’d add my two cents worth to the discussion.

Gray areas

3 minute read

Published:

I was struck by the similar topic areas in two different and disparate podcasts that I listen to.

mxcc

recipe

Vegan Cookies

2 minute read

Published:

Vegan Peanut Butter Cookies

Meat loaf

1 minute read

Published:

I started with this recipe, but wanted to use fresh green leafy vegetables instead of the dried ones. I also wanted to give it a bit more bite, so I added some fresh green chiles.

Meat pies

1 minute read

Published:

Ryan Mason’s meat pies… modulo @kootsoop

reflection

Open exams and brackets

5 minute read

Published:

Recently, I was told by a senior academic that I should ensure that only about 25% to 30% of the students in my class should be awarded a grade of A, that 40% to 50% are awarded a B, and that the remainder should be C and below. This started me wondering: what is the right proportion per grade? And, once we decide that, how does a teacher achieve it?

Why is writing hard?

3 minute read

Published:

I’ve been trying to write each weekday morning this year. Things started off well, but now I’m finding it hard to find the time to write and even harder to find the topics to write about.

robot

signal processing

social media

teaching

Open exams and brackets

5 minute read

Published:

Recently, I was told by a senior academic that I should ensure that only about 25% to 30% of the students in my class should be awarded a grade of A, that 40% to 50% are awarded a B, and that the remainder should be C and below. This started me wondering: what is the right proportion per grade? And, once we decide that, how does a teacher achieve it?