Blackrock Further Education Institute — Prior Teaching (2024–25)
Blackrock Further Education Institute — 2024–25
One academic year at BFEI, teaching the AI and Machine Learning Foundations programme at QQI Level 5–6. The programme comprised seven modules taught across the year, with three deliberately designed cross-module integration points.
Courses
Foundations of Object Oriented Programming (FOOP)
The main course with publicly available materials. Students progressed from procedural Python to C# OOP through a three-part solar system project — each part adding a layer of OOP abstraction on top of the previous version.
- Solar System OOP 1 of 3 — From basic data structures to a first class hierarchy
- Solar System 2 of 3 — Notebook version of the class-based implementation
- Solar System Bonus 3 of 3 — Advanced extensions: fuel systems, weather, new celestial types
The course also included a Skills Demo sequence connecting programming to mathematics, culminating in a group Eircode recognition project using EMNIST and neural networks.
Other Modules
PDP (Programming Design Principles), Mathematics for IT, Computational Methods, Database Methods, Web Authoring, and Software Architecture — all taught as an integrated programme.
Integration
The most distinctive aspect of this year was the deliberate integration across modules. See the Cross-Module Integration Summary for the full mapping of how seven modules were connected through shared projects and assessment.
For the philosophy behind cross-module integration, see Learning Mathematics Through Programming.
