Category Archives: learning

Join us on Monday 2nd February at 2pm GMT to discuss using Semantic Waves to analyse the effectiveness of unplugged computing activities

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After a brief break for the ACM Computing Education Conference (CEP) [1] earlier this month, our first journal club of 2026 is on Monday 2nd February at 2pm GMT. We’ll be discussing using Semantic Waves [2] with Jane Waite from the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge and Paul Curzon from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). From the abstract

We apply the notion of ‘semantic waves’ from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), a powerful educational framework, to Computer Science Education. We consider two case studies exploring how a simple analysis can help improve learning activities. The case studies focus on unplugged activities used in the context of both teaching school students and teacher continuing professional development. We used a simple method based on LCT to analyse the activities in terms of their ‘semantic profiles’: changes in the context-dependence and complexity of the knowledge being taught. This led to improvements to the activities. We argue that ‘semantic waves’, or moves back and forth between concrete/simpler and abstract/complex knowledge, help show ways that an unplugged activity might be effective or not, and how small changes to the activities can make a difference in potentially offering a more fruitful learning experience.

All welcome, meeting URL is public at zoom.us/j/96465296256 (meeting ID 9646-5296-256) but the password is private and pinned in the slack channel which you can join by following the instructions at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. CEP ’26: Proceedings of the 10th Computing Education Practice, Durham University DOI:10.1145/3772338
  2. Paul Curzon, Jane Waite, Karl Maton and James Donohue (2020) Using semantic waves to analyse the effectiveness of unplugged computing activities. In WiPSCE ’20: Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Primary and Secondary Computing Education (October): 1–10. DOI:10.1145/3421590.3421606

Join us to discuss ten things engineers should learn about learning on Monday 5th February at 2pm GMT

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“See one, do one, teach one” is a popular technique for teaching surgery to medical students. It has three steps:

  • You see one: by watching it, reading about it or listening to it
  • You do one: by engineering it or making it
  • You teach one: by telling others all about it


If you’re teaching engineers, what do you need to know beyond the seeing and doing? Understanding how human memory and learning works and the differences between beginners and experts can improve your teaching. So what practical steps can engineers take to improve the training and development of other engineers? What do engineers need to know in order to improve their own learning?

Join us on Monday 5th February at 2pm GMT (UTC) for our monthly ACM SIGCSE journal club meetup on zoom to discuss a paper on this topic by Neil Brown, Felienne Hermans and Lauren Margulieux, published in (and featured on the cover of) the January issue of Communications of the ACM. [1]

We’ll be joined by the lead author, Neil Brown of King’s College London, who will give us a lightning talk summary of the paper to kick off our discussion.

All welcome, as usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom, details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Neil C.C. Brown, Felienne F.J. Hermans and Lauren Margulieux (2024) 10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning, Communications of the ACM, Volume 67, No. 1. DOI:10.1145/3584859 (see accompanying video at vimeo.com/885743448 )