Working with Joshua Aaron

I work with schools, further education colleges, nonprofits, and organisations on projects at the intersection of education, technology, and pedagogy. My background spans computer science, mathematics, machine learning, and classroom teaching — which tends to be useful when the problem involves explaining technical ideas clearly, or designing learning experiences that actually work.

The Thread Running Through Most of My Work

Many students arrive at further education with a complicated relationship to mathematics — not because they can't do it, but because their experience of it has been mostly abstract, high-stakes, and disconnected from anything they care about. The same students will often take to programming with curiosity and enthusiasm. These two facts point to a curriculum design opportunity that most programmes leave on the table.

My most consistently effective work has involved designing courses — and helping institutions design courses — where programming and mathematics reinforce each other. Students build confidence with mathematical ideas by encountering them in a context that feels purposeful and concrete. The abstraction stops being the first thing they face and becomes instead something they arrive at naturally.

This isn't a fringe approach. It's grounded in a well-established body of research on contextual learning, and it connects to the way mathematics is actually used in technical fields. What makes it work in practice, though, is less about the curriculum design itself and more about two things that are harder to get right:

Teacher buy-in. A teacher who is sceptical of an integrated approach — or who doesn't feel confident moving between subjects — will undermine even a well-designed programme. The design work and the professional development work have to happen together.

Assessment and feedback. Pass rates tend to improve when integration is done well, and I do have evidence of that — student feedback, external evaluator commendations, and improved outcomes across cohorts I've worked with. But chasing the metrics is the wrong frame. The more meaningful shift is when students receive feedback that connects their programming work to their mathematical understanding, and vice versa. That requires rethinking how assessment is designed, not just what is assessed.

If you're an institution looking to improve maths outcomes specifically, I'd encourage you to read that last paragraph twice before getting in touch. I'm happy to talk about what I've seen work, and what I've seen fail despite good intentions.

What I Offer

Curriculum Design & Development

I design courses, modules, and learning sequences — from a single assignment brief to a full QQI-aligned programme. Subjects I've built materials for include:

Mathematics and programming, taught as integrated modules
Web technologies and databases
AI and machine learning (technical and non-technical)
Research and study skills
Personal and professional development

I can produce briefs, worksheets, rubrics, teacher guides, and student-facing resources. I'm comfortable working from a blank page or taking an existing course and restructuring it. Most materials I produce become the property of the commissioning organisation, but samples are available on request — and the teaching materials and guides on this site give a sense of my approach.

AI Workshops & CPD for Teachers

I run workshops for teaching staff on artificial intelligence — both the practical side (how to use these tools) and the conceptual side (how they work and what that means for education). These can be standalone sessions or multi-day programmes.

The non-technical workshop series covers AI literacy, tool limitations, prompt design, and classroom applications — no prior technical knowledge required. The technical series goes further, covering how models actually learn, from fitting a line to building a network.

Workshop materials developed for DCFE are publicly available here.

I'm happy to adapt these for different institutional contexts, or build something new based on your team's specific needs and starting point. This work connects naturally to the curriculum integration question above: AI tools change what mathematical fluency needs to look like, and that has implications for how we teach both subjects.

Content & Editorial

I write and edit educational content professionally, including:

Explainers and long-form guides on technical topics
Curriculum-aligned content for print and digital
Learning materials for EdTech products

Past clients include Nelson (educational publishing) and Paper. I approach content work the same way I approach teaching — the goal is always that the reader actually understands, not just that the page is filled.

Research & Pedagogy

I recently completed a Masters in Human Centred Artificial Intelligence at TU Dublin, with prior academic work in machine learning and intelligent systems at TU Berlin. My research interests focus on how AI systems interact with human learning and cognition, and the societal implications of AI in educational contexts.

I'm available for:

Research collaboration or advisory roles
Contributing to curriculum or policy work in AI and education
Writing or reviewing position papers and educational frameworks

Getting in Touch

I work with a range of clients — from well-resourced organisations to public schools and nonprofits on tighter budgets. If you represent a public institution or nonprofit and are concerned about cost, don't let that stop you from reaching out. I'm transparent about rates and confident we can find an arrangement that works.

For inquiries, please use the contact form and include a brief description of the project, your timeline, and — where relevant — your budget or budget range. This helps me give you a useful response quickly.

If you'd like a sense of how I think about teaching before reaching out, the guides and for colleagues sections are a good starting point. The piece on learning mathematics through programming is probably the most direct expression of the approach described above.

Some publicly available examples of the kind of work I do:

AI Workshops for Teachers — a five-session non-technical workshop series on AI literacy, tool limitations, prompting, and classroom implications, plus a parallel technical series on how models actually learn. These give a good sense of how I structure professional development.
AIML Web Authoring — an integrated course combining AI/ML and web development, where students build portfolios from their Jupyter notebooks. A practical example of cross-subject integration.
Personal and Professional Development briefs — four structured briefs (GitHub Pages, organisational case study, year planning, and professional materials) that show how I design assessment sequences.
Object-Oriented Programming at BFEI — a three-part solar system project used to teach OOP through a concrete, engaging context. Shows a similar philosophy applied to programming rather than mathematics.

I'm happy to share additional materials, explain the thinking behind any of the above, or put you in touch with colleagues or students who have worked with me. References are available on request.

I am currently based in Dublin and teach full-time at Dublin College Dundrum. I take on consultancy work that fits alongside my teaching commitments.