During the 1999-2000 school year I am on sabbatical at UNITEC Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand. I am teaching in the Department of Information Systems and Computing (DISC), which is located in the Faculty of Business. Click on the underlined words (hyperlinks) to learn more about each entity.

This is the view I have as I arrive on campus each morning.

For Semester 2, 1999 (July-November) I taught three courses:

• 06.522 - Data. This is an introduction to representation of information in the computer. It is a little computer architecture (binary numbers, 2's complement notation, IEEE-754 floating point numbers, etc.), a little data structures (stacks, queues, linked lists, etc.), a little file structures (file organizations, record access, B+-trees), and a little database management (Oracle, SQL, etc.).

• 06.530 - Programming 2. This is the course where students learn C++. Although it appears to be the second programming course, the first one does not have a lot of programming practice, so this is the first course where students get a significant amount of time writing computer programs.
• 06.730 - Special Topic: Computer Graphics. This course has never been taught at UNITEC before, so it was a wonderful experience to introduce it here. I had 14 students in the course, and they really enjoyed it. By the nature of the students here I had to teach more mathematics than I do in the course at Rose-Hulman, but they got significant exposure to computer graphics and wrote some impressive graphics programs.

At the end of the school year I was notified that because of my excellent performance I would be receiving a NZ$2,000 bonus. What wonderful timing, as we were just leaving for a five week tour around the South Island. During that time, I took 32 rolls of pictures (you'll have to wait until I get back to Rose in the fall to see them). However, my wife took many photos with our digital camera, and you can go to her web page for some of the awesome scenery of the South Island.

For Semester 1, 2000 (February-June) I taught the Data and Programming 2 courses again; the Computer Graphics course did not attract enough students to allow it to be offered. Instead, I supervised four level 7 projects (equivalent to Rose-Hulman's senior projects course). These projects included an operating system simulator written in Java, a photo portal web site, and two e-commerce web sites.

 

 

This is a view of the Computing Courtyard. It is located in the relocatable village. The department moved into new, permanent space at the end of 1999, which is being used for the first time in the 2000 school year. Like departments back in the U.S., the new space is still under construction and we have already outgrown it!

We have planned our trip back to the U.S. at the end of my sabbatical. We are going to take advantage of around-the-world airfares to visit Sydney, Bali, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Germany before returning to the U.S. Our arrival date back in Terre Haute is August 20, 2000.

Our family is maintaining a web page of our experiences. It contains commentary about the things we're seeing and many photographs of the beautiful scenery in New Zealand. It is updated regularly. Here is a link to that page. Visit the page often, and continue to check here for further updates on my visit to New Zealand and my sabbatical experience.

Last updated: Tuesday, August 21, 2001