MEGA program notes

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Nick and I have been at MEGA for four weeks now, going through the program with our idea, The Coworking Sociatea. Nick has done a great job of updating our front facing website, which can currently be found here. Through our time in the MEGA program we’ve been privy to some great mentors and great learning discussions. We’ve been given some great ideas for our product, and some great inspiration from the mentors and presenters, such as:

“You’ve got 24 hours a day. You take away eight for sleep and you have 16 left. How are you using them?” – Ben Marsh

“Change your attitude, change your life?” – Ben Marsh

“Luck is when opportunity and preparation meet.” – Ben Marsh

“Be phenomenal or be forgotten.” – Ben Marsh

“People who are talented at art are just talented. This is a lie.”  – Shane Bevin

“Turn up to events as often as you can.” – Shane Bevin

“Most people I know, when they do brainstorming – it’s more of a light shower.” – Shane Bevin

“Think outside the square, but know that the square is there.” – Shane Bevin

“Think in opposites. What is the problem? What isn’t the problem?” – Shane Bevin

“No one really cares about that other than you. They don’t care about how cool the programming is or the different things it can do. They only really care about the value to them is.” – Gavin Artz

“Ideas are cheap and your ideas will probably change. The important thing is taking your idea to market.” – Gavin Artz

“Money doesn’t just flow into your bank account when you’re running your own business.” – Tobi Pearce

“You can have the best product in the world but if it’s not put in front of the right people…” – Tobi Pearce

“The goal for any business should be to grow and get better.” – Tobi Pearce

Graduation

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Last Tuesday I got to graduate from my Bachelors degree! It was a pretty exciting experience and I was lucky enough to have people important to me attend either the ceremony or my celebratory dinner. It was just such a great experience wearing the Hogwarts-esque robes and walking across the stage to get my parchment.

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Honours Project Proposal

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On Wednesday this week I had to present my honours proposal to the rest of the commencing Computer Science Honours/Masters student cohort, as well as some of the academics within the school. My honours project is titled Automatic Group Formation – Data Analysis to Guide the Creation of Successful Student Groups, and I’m studying under Associate Professor Katrina Falkner, as part of the Computer Science Education Research (CSER) group at the University of Adelaide.

As part of this, I’m going to be looking into student metadata and finding ways of generating effective student groups using this data. At the moment, my approach will be to split metadata points into “required” and “preferred” criteria. For example, it may be a requirement for the students to be available at the same time, and to speak the same language. It may then be preferable to select students who have similar GPAs or forum contributions. My intended approach for this is to use hierarchical clustering to allow for this to happen.

I presented my proposal, and got some good questions and feedback from some of the crowd. I think I did a good job of conveying what my plans were, and the research I’ve done so far into my project. Of course, there are always things that I could do better – I could have rehearsed my presentation a bit more so that I felt a little bit more prepared, and I could have made better cue cards instead of reading from a big sheet of paper. Things to learn for next time, I guess! :)

Here‘s a cute little blog post welcoming me to the CSER group. I’m pretty excited to get working on this!