I had my first lecture last week in FW26. This room, like nearly all rooms and lecture theatres in the non-private side of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory (with the exception of FW11), is not suitable for teaching of Mathematics, being only provisioned for slide-based lectures. (There are some whiteboards, but they are both too small and too damaged to be used). I am new here, of course, but it is kind of hard to puzzle out how it came to be that the Computer Laboratory, formerly named the Mathematical Laboratory, has managed to “anti-equip” itself against the teaching of Mathematics. I gather that I am one of the only Lecturers in the Department, with a few exceptions, who does not lecture with slides…
I am sure that equipping rooms and lecture theatres with a gigantic immobile projection-screen wall seemed like a very good idea for teaching things like Systems, software engineering, etc.—topics equally deserving of well-provisioned teaching infrastructure. But I am left completely puzzled how we have managed to make it this far without rooms in which any materials that involve either writing or drawing can be taught. (If I had a few thousand quid lying around, I could use an iPad, but that is still several times worse than a chalkboard that spans a few multiples of my body length and height.)
I wrote about this on our internal Lecturers mailing list, and I was delighted to see colleagues chime in with their thoughts and leap into action, with our Head of Department and Building Services Manager proposing a Department-wide upgrade project that should restore our ability to teach Mathematics within the Computer Laboratory. I couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come.