Dear All, Sorry that there is no ideal time and thanks to those of you who have moved other meetings etc. First the coordinates. I am only expecting a handful of people so anybody in college can come to my office (Blackett 505) and I will be using the VC set up there. Otherwise the teams meeting will be at: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3aa4aacd8a744e4aeead6f43e3da2c0... Background =========== We use computers for teaching, both in dedicated computing suites and in experimental labs. Computing Teaching =================== - We have 120 machines in a dedicated suite on level 3 and these are used to teach the students how to program (mainly in python). These are quite often in a mess - machines on the floor (about 25% of them this morning), keyboards in a pile at he side of the room and sometimes/often in a poor software state such that (for example) anaconda cannot be installed for use by the students. The default solution when this happens is to tell them to "try another machine". We need to decide who is responsible for the support of these machines and how we do it. Leigh previously promised ICT support, but it doesn't appeared to be working (or happened at all). - Need plagiarism suite for code. Have been using MOSS but that is now slow and overworked. Were promised Gradescope (which has a commercialised version of MOSS inbuilt) at the beginning of the year, but this has failed to happen so far. This is needed. - Looking to next year, we would like to automate so much of at least the second year computing, by getting the students to use git and to use code checking tools directly both in their IDE and in git. This needs to be built now for next year. - Review of software installed. Computers in teaching labs =========================== - We have computers in several teaching labs with different configurations. These are mostly windows but there is some linux. The problems that with these set ups are mainly the lack of timely support and this is compounded by the lab technicians not having admin rights (would not be needed if support was fast). Last year, we were 12 hours away from cancelling an UG course because the correct software (LabView) was not installed on the machines that it was going to use despite a ticket being raised to install the software a month in advance. We have other machines were a needed package (Geant4) runs most of the time for most people but not all of the time for all of the people. Again the solution here seems to be to "try another machine". - Looking to the future, we would like to move a to a world where there are series of standard build for the different labs that work for all students. - Continued support for Linux in labs. Anything else? ================ -????? - Project support? Best, david