Blog

by Mohamed Khamis, University of Glasgow 26 June 2020 The SICSA PreCHI day is an annual event where researchers from SICSA institutions present their latest contributions to the premiere conference on Human-Computer Interaction: the International ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction – or simply CHI (pronounced ‘kai’). The PreCHI day serves two purposes: It is a chance to celebrate ...

By Dr Matthew Barr, Centre for Computing Science Education, University of Glasgow 11 June 2020 On 14 May, the University of Glasgow, with support from the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA), hosted an online workshop that looked at how the gender imbalance in Computing Science education might be addressed. Bringing together representatives from schools, universities, and ...

Transitions Edinburgh Napier recruits a high proportion of students from partner colleges as direct entrants and the work of the Associate Student Project supports this often-difficult transition.  Debbie Meharg, supported by Khristin Fabian, Ella Taylor-Smith and Alison Varey has developed a model of interventions to aid preparation and support direct entrants both pre and post-transition with ...

At GCU there are a number of active areas of education research and scholarship in Computing: Cloud Computing Curriculum Brian Hainey and Sajid Nazir are participants in a series of ITiCSE Working Groups which address the challenges that instructors face in teaching rapidly evolving cloud-related concepts. Brian is a co-leader of the ITiCSE 2020 group. Engagement in online ...

Within SICSA institutions we are doing excellent, ground-breaking work within the field of computing education research. We have asked the newly formed Education Champions to write short blogs about the research within their particular institution. At the University of Glasgow, the Centre for Computing Science Education supports several education research projects. Spatial skills Jack Parkinson is researching the ...

By Paola Ardón Ramírez 20 April 2020 I’m Paola and my research project is focused on robots collaborating on household tasks for which I use the concept of grasp affordances (knowing how to appropriately grasp objects given a task). From the beginning, the project has been planned to start on a theoretical basis and grow hierarchically to ...

by Èric Pairet, University of Edinburgh 15 April 2020 Howdy!, as my new Texan fellows would say. I’m`Eric Pairet, a part-time research associate at the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics that has just finished a four-month academic placement at Kavraki’s lab, Rice University, Houston, US. During the placement, I have been actively collaborating with Prof. Lydia Kavraki, a ...

We are pleased to announce that the Scottish Funding Council has awarded us further funding to continue the Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) research pool until July 2021 We now have a new series of funding calls open with increased support across our research themes with the aim to extend and expand our links with other ...

Earlier this month, I took over as SICSA Director of Education from Dr Rachel Menzies, who has served in this capacity over the last two years. First off, I would like to thank Rachel for all her hard work, and I look forward to serving the community in this role. I am currently a Senior Lecturer ...

by Èric Pairet, Heriot Watt University 25 November 2019 Last week, I attended the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) organised by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ). IROS is one of the top conferences world-wide were scientists gather to present and discuss the state-of-the-art on robotics. This ...