Home/Teaching
Computer science, and a telescope on the field.
I teach A Level and BTEC computing at Oxford International College Brighton, and I am working to make the college a genuine international centre for space science — instruments students take data with, not a poster on a wall.
In the classroom
Exercises that have real answers.
Low-level computing is where students most reliably stop caring, because the problems are invented and nothing depends on getting them right. Astronomical data fixes both halves of that at once.
Assembly language, floating-point representation and file formats are the units students find hardest to care about. Taught against real data they are transformed: a FITS header is a genuinely unforgiving format, an error in floating point shows up as a visibly wrong image, and a student who wants to see the picture will fight harder for the answer than one completing a worksheet.
None of this is a substitute for the specification. It is a way of teaching the specification that leaves the student with something they can point at afterwards.
Specifications
- A LevelAQA Computer Science
- A LevelCIE Computer Science
- Level 3BTEC Computing
Instruments
- Optical imagingOperational
- PhotometryOperational
- Radio telescopeIn planning
Resources
- LicenceFree to use
- FormatSlides, worksheets, data
- StatusComing here
The programme
What a school instrument actually takes.
Getting from an idea to a dish that produces data somebody else would want is mostly not an astronomy problem. It is money, site, interference, governance, and the question of who owns the results.
The optical setup came first because it is the one that survives contact with a timetable: students can plan an observing run, take data on a clear night, and reduce it themselves the following week. The whole chain matters more than the picture at the end — a student who has calibrated their own frames understands what an image is in a way no amount of looking at Hubble pictures achieves.
The radio telescope is the harder build and the more interesting one, because radio observing does not care about cloud, daylight or the school day. It is currently at the site-survey and capital-bid stage.
Placeholder page. Teaching resources, unit plans and specification mappings belong here as downloadable files — the structure is ready for them.