As I had mentioned previously, this year, I’m going back to school. Not to take classes, but to teach a course at my alma mater, Fanshawe College. I did this about a decade ago and thought it was interesting, so I was excited to give it another go. Additionally, after a friend mentioned that their kid wanted to learn Python, I developed an Intro to Python aimed at high school students that I’m teaching weekly. I thought that this would be good fodder for the State of Security. So, whenever I have something interesting to discuss, expect to find it here.

When I taught a decade ago, one of my biggest surprises was how much students wanted to be spoon fed information. One of my greatest joys when I got into computers in the late 90s is still one of my favourite things – learning something new. I love being presented a challenge and digging into it. When I developed the courses I wrote 10+ years ago, they were filled with challenges. The students were given a problem and enough information to point them in the right direction, but they didn’t know how to actually solve the problem. They wanted to learn by having everything handed to them, instead of figuring it out by themselves.

This time around, I developed the college course the same way… I expect students to research and problem solve in order to complete my labs. With my high school course, however, I spoon feed them everything, they learn from making mistakes in typing out the code and watching how the code works. I think that this makes sense as I have very different expectations between high school and college students. I was surprised, however, to learn from my college students that they had courses (Read more...)