As I have not posted yet, I am currently doing a part-time teaching job at my college alma mater, the University of San Agustin on the subject of Computer Fundamentals and Programming. The actual class started last January, which is months late already for the second semester. The pressure now is on me to be able to complete the whole course outline by the end of the semester in March and as of this posting, it will be March on Friday.

Computer fundamentals would mean to start with the history of the Computer, its uses and some of the application desktop software that is widely used nowadays. While I try not to bore my students with the usual lectures and stuff, I try to provide them exercises that will be useful for their professions someday. They initially have given them MS Word exercises to do during laboratory hours and so far we were on to the Exer 10 and 11.

I also used a practical approach to their assignments. I liked it to be on the direct application of a certain topic or software. For instance, I have tasked them to do a Google and Yahoo search of articles on the topic “Civil Engineering Trends”. This is to practice their ability to choose the most relevant topic on the list of results.

Recently, I have asked them to do another Google research again and the results are to be presented using the MS PowerPoint software. This is to familiarize them with the basic functions as well as to make them be creative in making the layouts and organizing the slides. We will gauge the results once they passed their presentations on Monday, and I do hope they won’t do the copy-paste of the assignments from the classmates again.