Blog

14 June 2021 by Kobi Gal, University of Edinburgh The remote collaborative activities culminated this month with the submission for the undergraduate thesis by Stefi Tirkovi on Massive Online Learning Courses (MOOCs). The shift from traditional face-to face learning to online activities forced by the COVID-19 pandemic has shown an immense increase in enrolment rates in MOOC platforms. ...

09 June 2021 by Bedour Alshaigy, University of Aberdeen SICSA is proud to announce the successful launch of the Reading Group series organised by Bedour Alshaigy (University of Aberdeen) and Jim Paterson (Glasgow Caledonian University). The first event, hosted virtually on 9th April, discussed two SIGCSE ‘21 conference publications: Finding Video-watching Behavior Patterns in a Flipped CS1 Course Colin Moore, ...

20 May 2021 by Mireilla Bikanga Ada, University of Glasgow & Fiona McNeill, University of Edinburgh The educational landscape has seen a major shift over the past 12 months. As the world starts to heal, it is important to reflect on what worked and what did not, so we can provide new insights into ways of helping ...

20 May 2021 by Habiba Farzand, University of Glasgow I was able to attend a course titled “Statistics for HCI” offered at the ACM CHI 2021 conference by Prof Alan Dix, with the generous support of SICSA. The course was organized as part of the ACM CHI 2021 conference which is the biggest conference in HCI (Human-Computer Interaction). ...

With most national and international conferences currently being held on-line due to the pandemic, SICSA is taking the opportunity to open a new funding call which will allow PhD students, currently studying in a SICSA institution, to apply for the cost of the registration fees for a virtual conference. If there is a specific Conference you ...

23 March 2021 By Debbie Meharg, Edinburgh Napier University In February a SICSA Education event hosted by Edinburgh Napier University explored the HN Next Gen project and the implications for direct entrants into computing degrees. Bobby Elliott from SQA gave the keynote and explained that the HN qualifications in Computing were last revised in 2003, leaving them ...

We are pleased to announce that we are now recruiting for a new Director of the SICSA Graduate Academy.  Applications are welcome from any suitable member of academic staff working at a SICSA member institution. The SICSA Graduate Academy (SGA) is an international graduate school in Informatics and Computer Science. All Informatics and Computer Science PhD ...

12 January 2021 By Dr Joseph Maguire, University of Glasgow The United Kingdom and Ireland Computing Education Research (UKICER) conference is sponsored by the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) UK Special Interest Group in Computing Science Education (SIGCSE) chapter and is emerging as one of the leading venues nationally for researchers to meet and share advances in ...

18 December 2020 By Mark Zarb, SICSA Director of Education First of all – you’ll remember that at SICSA Conference, we had Professor Sally Fincher (Professor Emerita, University of Kent) give a talk about Educational Resilience. She then joined the Education Champions in a Panel format, taking questions from the audience. These videos have been uploaded, and are ...

25 November 2020 By Hans-Wolfgang Loidl, Heriot-Watt University The series of SICSA Programming Challenges, started during lock-down in June 2020, is continuing and featured a Scotland-wide, SICSA-funded challenge, called “dynamic Denning”, on Wed 21st of October. As before, a sequence of programming tasks was posted on the OpenKattis platform which provides a huge repository of online problems, and performs ...