How the Pershore Plum Won the Great War

The First World War was won not just on the battlefields but on the Home Front, by the men, women and children left behind. This book explores the lives of the people of Pershore and the surrounding district in wartime, drawing on their memories, letters, postcards, photographs, leaflets and recipes to demonstrate how their hard work in cultivating and preserving fruit and vegetables helped to win the Great War. Pershore plums were used to make jam for the troops; but ensuring these and other fruits and vegetables were grown and harvested required the labour of land girls, Boy Scouts, schoolchildren, Irish labourers and Belgian refugees. When submarine warfare intensified, food shortages occurred and it became vital for Britain to grow more and eat less food. Housewives faced many challenges in feeding their families and so in 1916 the Pershore Women’s Institute was formed, providing many women with practical help and companionship during some of Britain’s darkest hours in history.

From Kandinsky to Java (The Use of 20th Century Abstract Art in Learning Programming)

At the University of Worcester we are continually striving to find new approaches to the learning and teaching of programming, to improve the quality of learning and the student experience. Over the past three years we have used the contexts of robotics, computer games, and most recently a study of Abstract Art to this end. This paper discusses our motivation for using Abstract Art as a context, details our principles and methodology, and reports on an evaluation of the student experience. Our basic tenet is that one can view the works of artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Malevich as Object-Oriented (OO) constructions. Discussion of these works can therefore be used to introduce OO principles, to explore the meaning of classes, methods and attributes and finally to synthesize new works of art through Java code. This research has been conducted during delivery of an “Advanced OOP (Java)” programming module at final-year Undergraduate level, and during a Masters’ OO-Programming (Java) module. This allows a comparative evaluation of novice and experienced programmers’ learning. In this paper, we identify several instructional factors which emerge from our approach, and reflect upon the associated pedagogy. A Catalogue of ArtApplets is provided at the associated web-site.