This page is under development, and will in due course contain details of some of the programs I have written over the years, most of them related to education.


Large Teaching Packages

(These have been published as self-standing systems and are accompanied by substantial documentation of significant academic relevance.)

  • (2001-3), Turtle Graphics Programming System, an innovative system for teaching programming and compiler concepts. The package contains a comprehensive on-line help file, explaining the principles of programming and compilation (including machine code and recursive heap/stack processing etc), and also providing a series of carefully graded exercises for self-teaching – 29,000 words
  • (2002-6), Elizabeth, a system developed initially to complement and illustrate a paper on the Turing Test, but also used in 2002-03 to provide the main introduction to Artificial Intelligence for all first year students in the School of Computing at Leeds. It starts from the ELIZA paradigm of conversation 'chatterbots', but has been greatly extended to facilitate the teaching of general AI principles and natural language processing concepts. The package contains a comprehensive on-line help file, explaining the operation of the system and giving an introduction to the principles of grammars and pattern matching etc. (including a working illustration of propositional logic theorem proving by automated resolution-refutation) – 25,000 words
  • (2003-), The Signature Stylometric System, developed to enable non-specialists to explore stylometric concepts (e.g. to assist with questions of disputed authorship). The package documentation is limited at present to a PowerPoint presentation, but a comprehensive on-line help file is planned in due course.
  • (2004-), Turtle Java Programming System, broadly similar to the 2001-3 system, but more advanced and with a Java compiler rather than Pascal.

 

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Screenshot of Elizabeth program

 

Screenshot of Signature program

 

Screenshot of Turtle Java program