Computing Education

Research Excellence Framework 2021

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The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) welcomes the publication of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework results.  The THE world university rankings table for the UK has also been recalculated on the basis of the 2021 REF and is published today.  For SICSA institutions:

  • 45% of research was world-leading (4*) and 43% internationally excellent (3*).
  • Over 90% of impact is judged outstanding or very considerable.
  • Overall SICSA departments were responsible for over 15% of high-quality research in the UK.
  • Over 70% of Scottish-based researchers entered in REF 2021 are working in Departments that have improved their THE ranking in a competitive and active discipline.

Stuart Anderson (SICSA Director) said:

“The REF 2021 results confirm the strength of Informatics and Computer Science in Scotland with a significant majority of researchers working in departments that have improved their overall ranking.  That SICSA departments contribute 15% of the high-quality research in the UK clearly demonstrates again that Scotland punches far above its weight in the discipline. Scotland has great strengths in this key area for our economy and society. 

This is a tremendous achievement on the part of the staff across all our Scottish departments, my congratulations to all involved in the continuing success of Informatics and Computer Science research in Scotland”.

 

SICSA appoints new Director of Education

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We are delighted to announce Dr Matthew Barr, University of Glasgow is joining us as the new Director of Education. Dr Barr (Matt) commenced in post this week taking over from Dr Mark Zarb, Robert Gordon University who stepped down following 2 years in the role.

Matt is well known to SICSA due to his active involvement within our Education Theme over the years and will join the Directorate with a great ongoing vision for the role. He has been involved with events focused on Graduate Apprenticeships and championing the urgency of gender balance in CS Education. Matt initiated and led the organisation of a SICSA supported workshop on Gender Imbalance in Computing Science Education in May 2020 which ultimately resulted in the creation of the Ada Scotland Festival.  He has also been involved in supporting his colleagues with other SICSA funded workshops over the years.

Matt has been teaching in Higher Education in some form since 2008, after leaving industry to work as a research systems developer at the University of Glasgow.  He has built an expansive network of contacts over the years with colleagues from Skills Development Scotland, Scottish Government/Scottish Funding Council as well as a range of industry partners.

When notified of his appointment to the role as SICSA Director of Education, Matt said “I am delighted to be able to serve as Director of Education for SICSA. It is my intention to use this opportunity to work on improving equality, diversity and inclusion in Computing Science education across Scotland’s universities. I also hope to be able to create mentorship opportunities for colleagues engaged in teaching CS, and help to share the excellent teaching practice that I know goes on across all of our institutions!”

Matt is succeeding in the role by Dr Mark Zarb who has been the SICSA Director of Education for the last two years.  The SICSA Directorate would like to extend a huge thank you to Mark for his amazing work with CS Education.  Amongst other areas of achievement within the role, Mark has created and strengthened the CS Education community, supported a vast range of education events, and initiated the Educations Champions who produced ongoing webinars on how to adapt to on-line teaching which were a great source of support to our SICSA colleagues throughout the pandemic.  Mark’s enthusiasm, positivity and zest for CS Education is admirable and we wish him well in his new role at RGU!

We are now recruiting for a new SICSA Director of Education

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SICSA is now recruiting a new Director of Education

SICSA Education has a focus on enhancing collaboration across the core activities of Undergraduate and Postgraduate education provision in Scotland. The group represents common interests to government; employers; professional and practitioner organisations; and the wider education sectors. These include resourcing for University Computing programmes, secondary school qualifications, the transition from school to University, and graduate skills.

This role provides an excellent opportunity for the right candidate to not only shape the future direction of SICSA Education, but also the direction of the presently changing landscape in computing education as we emerge from the covid-19 pandemic.

It is expected that the candidate is seconded to this role for 0.2FTE (one day a week).

If you would like to speak informally about the role, please contact our current Director of Education, Dr Mark Zarb (m.zarb@rgu.ac.uk )

More information on the role can be found on the role descriptor

To apply, please complete the application form and send it to Aileen.Orr@glasgow.ac.uk by Friday 17th December 2021.

SICSA Conference 2020

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We are delighted to announce that the SICSA Conference 2020 will take place, on-line on 1 October 2020 and will be under the theme SICSA and the Sustainable Society.

The conference this year will be co-located with ScotSoft, which is Scotland’s leading tech conference allowing our delegates to access elements of the event throughout the day.

For this year’s conference we have prepared a rich and varied schedule addressing the many challenges presented by the idea of a future Sustainable Society. We are delighted to have Dr Elizabeth F. Churchill (UX Director, Google) and Professor Sally A. Fincher (School of Computing Science, University of Kent) as our Keynote Speakers.

You will have the chance to hear about issues and challenges encountered in Computing Science Education, discussed at the Education Panel Session. Excellent exemplars of graduate research across SICSA will be presented from the shortlisted candidates for the SICSA PhD Award for Best Dissertation during at the PhD Lightning Talks session.

We have invited participation from our partner research pools across Scotland, allowing us to bring together a large community of people to discuss the Computing and interdisciplinary challenges ahead. The SICSA Research Themes will show case research that demonstrates cutting edge computing research and its potential to address the Sustainable Society Challenge.

We have inaugurated a new award for Best PhD Thesis in Scotland at the Conference this year and the winner will receive a prize of £2,000 generously sponsored by Amazon Development Scotland.

Given the current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic the Conference this year will be held online, allowing us to increase our audience and have invited speakers from far and wide. The Conference will be open to all members from across the SICSA institutions, industry partners and all SICSA key stakeholders

Visit the SICSA Conference 2020 website to find out more and register your interest to attend the event.

SICSA Funding Call Now Open

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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 research pools (SUPA/SULSA/SINAPSE etc.) and with the Scottish Innovation Centres https://www.sicsa.ac.uk/funding/

To support students in SICSA, we have a new program of SICSA Research Scholars to undertake studies and/or research via Summer/Winter Schools attendance and/or research visits.

For staff, SICSA can support, Academic and Research Distinguished Visiting Fellows from Academia or Industry, Research Theme Event Sponsorship, Postdoctoral and Early Career Researcher Exchanges (PECE), our European Leaders Programme and Education Event Sponsorship.  Full information on the funding opportunities can be found at https://www.sicsa.ac.uk/funding/.

The next deadline is April 30th, and we welcome applications for Research Theme Events which connect between SICSA themes or connect SICSA to other research pools.

Submissions with commitments of matched funding from other research pools or innovation centres are strongly encouraged.  Some of these events might aim to explore grand challenges while other events might focus of emerging research.

SICSA supports Code Your Future (CYF)

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by Gianluca Palombo
5 August 2019

CodeYourFuture are a charity who train refugees, asylum seekers and people from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds to become professional software developers. We are already running classes in London, Manchester, Glasgow and Rome – with plans to extend to other cities in the near future. On the weekend of the 27th June, CodeYourFuture students, graduates, applicants, mentors and public guests gathered to celebrate and find out more about our work and, more generally, efforts to use tech as a force for positive social change in society: https://conference.codeyourfuture.io/

Friday 28 June
Over 100 students, volunteers, applicants, partners and guests assembled throughout our first day of the CodeYourFuture Conference 2019 in Glasgow. The venue was the wonderful Sir Charles Wilson building, where we guaranteed a memorable day of work courtesy of the University of Glasgow and the UofG Computing Science department.Thanks to our insightful panels and guest speaker presentations, CYF members and public guests were able to gain fantastic and unique insights into the crossover between tech, community development and social justice.

Highlights included inspiring lessons and testimonies delivered by speakers such as Mel McKendrick, CEO at Optomize Ltd and Assistant Professor in Psychology at Heriot-Watt University, and Pheona Matuvo, co-founder and director at community interest company Radiant and Brighter. Our own CYF graduates shared their incredible stories in their own panel, inspiring current and future students – whilst through gratefully-received tea and coffee breaks, networks were built as new friends were made in addition to a lot of overdue catching up between CYF cohorts from across the UK.

Friday was wound down with a relaxing evening at the home of one of our amazing Glasgow volunteers, Carme! We should give a special thanks to SICSA for covering expenses for the food and refreshments we are able to provide at this occasion and others throughout the Conference weekend for the benefit of our CYF members and guests.

Saturday 29 June
On Saturday, we carried on, as CYF students, graduates, mentors and organisers got to work on technical skills development and strategy planning! On Saturday, we found ourselves in a similarly inspiring conference environment as we were hosted by BBC Scotland in their amazingly impressive Pacific Quay headquarters.

Students on the day were able to learn and share different skills alongside their counterparts and predecessors as well as mentors from CYF cohorts in different cities. Highlights included insightful and valuable workshops by Michael Antczak, experienced software developer and tech meet-up organiser, and Alec McEchran, former Senior Software Engineer at YouTube and Google and now Principal Engineer at KPV LAB Edinburgh.

For mentors and organisers, the day consisted of creative group work and discussions, helping to agree on fundamental universal goals of CYF cohorts and thinking how we can help provide even greater access to life-changing social and professional development for disadvantaged groups in the UK and further afield.

Saturday ended with us gathering at West of Scotland Cricket Club in Glasgow for a final winding down and celebration following a high-octane yet fulfilling two days.

Overall, we were delighted with how the Conference went, and hope that our public guests, in particular, were able to gain extra insight into the valuable and unique work we do at CodeYourFuture. For the CYF community, we come away with renewed energy, inspiration and more coherent aims and strategies. We hope these things will aid us in continuing to channel tech, education and community empowerment in an effort to improve our societies.

We thank SICSA for supporting the conference along with The University of Glasgow, BBC Scotland, Financial Times and our microsponsors who donated online.

SICSA Education – Call for Workshop Proposals in 2019

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SICSA Education would like to invite the Scottish Computing community to apply for funds to host SICSA Education workshops or other education focussed events. Some of the more recent workshops that have been funded have included:

• How should we assess group work?
• Skills in entrepreneurial education
• Computational thinking in primary schools

We now invite members of the community to bid to host an event, either to expand on any of these topics; or to propose events on any other Computing Education related topic.

In order to apply please complete the attached pro forma (no more than 2 pages) and return it to admin@sicsa.ac.uk by Friday 31st May 2019. A further call will be made in the Autumn, but we will also accept applications throughout the year.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact admin@sicsa.ac.uk.

Detailed information about SICSA Education can be found at http://www.sicsa.ac.uk/education/education-event-sponsorship/ and http://www.sicsa.ac.uk/education/.

SICSA supports the new Teach Computing Science Handbook for Primary Teachers

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by Professor Judy Robertson, University of Edinburgh
24 April 2019

SICSA Education has recently sponsored the production of a handbook to help primary teachers to teach the new computing strand of the Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland. For the first time, children aged 3 years upwards will learn about key computing concepts as part of the Technologies curriculum. This is a great step forwards, because it will lay the foundations for understanding the fundamentals of process and information which young people can build on if they elect to study computing in the senior phase of high school. To help primary teachers and early years practitioners get to grips with the new curriculum, and give them lesson ideas, a group of volunteers got together to write a handbook – Kate Farrell (Computing at Schools Scotland, Judy Robertson (University of Edinburgh), Quintin Cutts (University of Glasgow) and Richard Connor (University of Stirling).

The guide has already proved popular with schools – for example, a parent wrote to tell us “I’ve been working with my daughter’s primary school and using the guide to help introduce CS throughout the school. The guide has been instrumental in rolling out a curriculum for P4 upwards”. It has also been adapted for use with West Dunbarton Council. We are currently working on a similar guide for the early stages of high school.

We have posted a paper copy of the guide to all the primary schools in Scotland. Why not check with your local school to see if they received it, or if you can give them a hand to teach some programming lessons? You can download a free copy of the guide at www.teachcs.scot.

 

SICSA Education funding helps PWSAfrica’s goal to empower scientists in Africa with the basic computer programming skills.

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by PWSAfrica Team
13 November 2018

PWSAfrica’s goal is to empower scientists in Africa with the basic computer programming skills, which they would need to enhance their research. In August 2018, five computer scientists from the University of Glasgow set foot in Nigeria to run the first edition of this initiative. The workshop was certainly successful in training over 100 participants (a mix of postgraduates and undergraduates from the STEM departments) on the basics of Python programming. The day before the workshop started, we ran an “installation party” where students could bring their laptops and get help following installation instructions for Anaconda on their systems.

The two-week course was split into a few sections: Python fundamentals for the first half of the course (based initially on Dr. John Williamson’s materials for teaching Python at the University of Glasgow). Following this, a few days were spent on packages specifically useful for use in a scientific context, such as Numpy, Pandas and Matplotlib. Finally, participants completed group work where, for two days, they worked together to complete challenging tasks that would test their Python abilities. These were genuinely complex, and included producing animations of fireworks, writing language interpreters, solving mathematical modelling challenges and constructing matching algorithms.

An exciting part of the workshop — from our perspective — was how quickly we had to think to accommodate new information as we received it. Within the first day of teaching it quickly became apparent that the method of teaching we had assumed — providing content in Jupyter notebooks that could be worked through and assisted with by tutors in the room — did not work well with a room of students with mostly mathematical background! Their preference was to begin with a lecturing style, meaning we were constructing our content usually the night before it was delivered.

However, when we did teach with a lecturing style, we were hit with another surprise: students also enjoyed seeing code being run on a projector, and much preferred the tight feedback loop of writing code and seeing it execute to code written on a board, almost as mathematics. This wasn’t what we expected at all, and we found ourselves fitting a blend of the computing science teaching we were used to and the mathematics-style teaching that they were familiar with. This quick turnaround, where we would have to quickly find and implement solutions to problems, kept us on our toes in a satisfying and exciting way.

An aspect of the workshop that also stood out was the way our participants responded to being a part of the workshop. Their enthusiasm for the course was tremendous. Students were eager to ask questions and engage with the materials; the excited students would stay for their morning session, and after their lesson was finished, sit through the repeated lesson in the afternoon session so they could ask further questions. We had to put them in a separate room!

Events like PWSAfrica are only as successful as the people who attend, because ultimately, our “product” is their learning. For all our careful planning, the students’ willingness to engage determined whether our efforts were worth it! So, considering this, the students we happened to train were an absolute gift.

The workshop took place at the Department of Mathematics, University of Ibadan, in Nigeria. Our hosts were very kind and hospitable, and went to every effort imaginable to make sure our experience of Nigeria was the best it could possibly be. It was! We all have our own stories and memories that were taken from the trip. Personally, I still crave “Mr. Dennis’ Very Good Eggs”, have flashbacks every time I have to restart a Jupyter kernel, and reminisce on the heavy Nigerian rain cutting through muggy warm air. I loved the way it would kick up dust, and then angst from our students, who managed to spend most of their year free of precipitation altogether.

Which is to say: between our own incredible experiences, students with a voracious academic appetite, exciting technological challenges, and the eventual success of seeing students solve genuinely complex problems, we all consider PWSAfrica to be a roaring success: for the students’ experience; for the knowledge we impacted; and for our own incredible journey.

Needless to say, we’re excited for 2019!

Welcome to our new SICSA Director of Education

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by Dr Rachel Menzies, SICSA Education Director
5 March 2018

In February, I took over as the SICSA Director of Education, a post which had been vacant since Dr Karen Petrie stepped down last year. Already I’ve been really busy, sitting on a number of advisory boards so far, and I’m only two weeks in! I’m currently a lecturer at the University of Dundee and have been a member of SICSA since 2008 in both Education and HCI. Most recently, I was the SICSA PhD Conference Academic Chair for 2017 in Dundee. This was a brilliant event sharing the future of SICSA and Computing Science in Scotland.  This year the conference will be held at RGU – make sure you are signed up, it’s shaping up to be a great few days!

Personally, I have an interest in how social media can be used in education and how we can support our students to take part in group work. However, this is just a very small part of the excellent work being done within SICSA, including links with the SQA on curriculum development, flipped classroom methodologies, early-years computational thinking and involvement in outreach events such as The First Lego League. We have a great base of knowledge, enthusiasm and resources in Scotland to make sure that we are creating technologists of the future, and I’m so excited to be a part of it.

Like many of us, I have been supported by SICSA in many ways over my career, through funding for workshops, away days, all-hands meetings and travel costs. Now I can continue this support for others. I’m planning a great programme that will help us gather momentum as a community to share our ideas and experiences and collectively influence national policies on computing education. This includes a new lecturer induction, a call for workshops, schools engagement and an all-hands education event to showcase what we can do.

If you have any ideas of things that can be done to build the education community, then let me know. I am particularly keen to reach out to universities who may not have been able to engage with SICSA Education in the past, for whatever reasons. Contact me on r.menzies@dundee.ac.uk to get the ball rolling in your ideas. A call for workshop funding will follow in the next few weeks.