Computer scientist and educator. Creator of ChessCraft. Senior computer scientist at Environment Canada.
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
Every so often someone asks me what I thought about the master's program in education technology (instructional design) at Concordia University in Montreal. If that's you, you've come to the right place.
Overall I'm happy I enrolled. However the master's was just an outlet for my own self-drive and did …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
Most training videos are really bad. This is troublesome to me because I must constantly re-explain my philosophies and processes to colleagues or volunteers. This page aims to help.
Over the years I've made over a hundred training videos for public servants, high school and university students, workshops, and the …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
Richard Stallman may be a legend in the world of software, but he also has decades of history promoting a toxic environment in software communities. Due to this, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been pressured to kick out Stallman from the board of directors, which they did, though he …
Posted by Stuart Spence in ChessCraft
There is a possibility that ChessCraft will be used to teach artificial intelligence in a university course! My commandline interface already supports round robin tournaments, and a professor expressed some interest today. It occurred to me that if I prepare a package, lots of AI professors could use it. And …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
When I post tutorial videos people often make suggestions on how to improve my computer code. Thank you for your code suggestions! However, we may have a problem.
I often find that code suggestions are not teaching suggestions. Almost all computer programmers are not experienced educators, so this is understandable …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
When I post tutorial videos, I get a lot of requests for personalized help. I want to help! Your project might even sound really cool to me. But here I'm going to explain why I probably cannot help you today.
One of the exciting things about the …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
"Yeh, If your a experianced coder, five mins no problem but if your a bigginer it can take hours." - Rowen Henderson8
"it would help a lot if you ppl would copy and paste the code into your videos on the bottom." - Emjay Club
"Fantastic but please add the script somewhere …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
What's the longest journey you've ever taken through university bureaucracy? Mine is probably longer. After five months of appeals, I'm finally able to register at Concordia as a McGill student for an equivalent course. Just like the comic above - I was arbitrarily denied for no good reason after getting approval …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
That's right, this guy:
A year ago I wrote a post called Nomination for Worst Professor. I highly recommend it if you're interested in how bad professors can possibly be. Here's a reminder if you need it though. First, the usual "merely bad professor" stuff:
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
Prepare to be amused and blown away. If you're a university student you may think your department is bad, but McGill's education department is worse. For several years now McGill education students report having the most boring, most random, most tuition-wasting, and most impossible-to-fail courses. This makes me really sad …
I'm open to IT leadership job opportunities. I'm also available as a consultant or to provide training.
