Aliyaan Zulfiqar Bhatti

My teaching style is dynamic and tailored to every student. My focus is on improving thinking regarding the processes we use in computer science, and engaging with those topics in a way that is not only fun; but is specifically engaging and desirable for that student.

I work part-time at the university as a student mentor and ambassador. As ambassador I help run open days for the Uni, specifically helping my course leader setup for their talks and workshop, as well as providing continuous support throughout the duration of the workshop. During these workshop sessions, I helped prospective students (typically A-Level and BTEC college students) to work through the tasks, assisting with troubleshooting and providing mentorship regarding specific processes and practices.

As a mentor, I ran one-to-one mentoring sessions with first and second year students in the Computing department, as well as a weekly coding workshop for the entire department every other Monday. One-to-one sessions typically centred around helping guide a student through an assignment, without simply completing the work for them. I learned to coach students towards finding the answer themselves, by utilising my advanced understanding of the topics they were learning in order to prompt them with important questions that would lead them in the correct direction. These sessions additionally would allow the student to bring any related topic of discussion they wanted guidance with - whether that was finding placements, improving their CV or something more personal. In the case of personal matters, I was responsible for signposting students to the relevant services within the University in order to best help that student.

The weekly workshop was similar, but focused more on specific coding problems and assignments that students were struggling with, and typically involved jumping across multiple tech stacks and levels of understanding while attending to approximately 15 students across a session. For example, you might be helping a first year web development student with a JavaScript problem, before moving onto a second year game development student who is struggling with some low-level optimisation. This experience provided me with the ability to communicate with many disciplines across computer science, even those that I have not been personally educated or trained in.

I also helped run a weekly coffee morning, engaging in conversations with many Computing students about placements, CVs and portfolios, and other study-related topics that they wished to discuss. I often invited students who attended the coffee morning to engage with the mentorship scheme further, advising them to attend the weekly workshop and to seek out one-to-one mentoring if they needed it. This situation was more relaxed and focused on student experience of University as opposed to specific assignments or work from on their respective courses.

Regarding my skills in computer science, I believe the clearest example of my skill and passion is my game "Racecar Crashers", which is scheduled to release on the PlayStation store later this year, with a wishlist page up right now (go and search for "Racecar Crashers"!). It has also been nominated for the TIGA Education Award's Best Student Game 2025. It is being published by Sheffield Hallam University's in-house studio called Steel Minions, but all development was carried out by myself and my team Trajectile Interactive (look us up too!).

If you want to be in a position where you can release your own game on a professional storefront in the future, I am the computer science tutor for you!