Tag Archives: joseph maguire

Join us to discuss Computing in school in the UK & Ireland on Monday 5th December at 2pm GMT

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CC licensed school image via flaticon.com

Computing is widely taught in schools in the UK and Ireland, but how does the subject vary across primary and secondary education in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland? Join us to discuss via a paper published at UKICER.com by Sue Sentance, Diana Kirby, Keith Quille, Elizabeth Cole, Tom Crick and Nicola Looker. [1]

Many countries have increased their focus on computing in primary and secondary education in recent years and the UK and Ireland are no exception. The four nations of the UK have distinct and separate education systems, with England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland offering different national curricula, qualifications, and teacher education opportunities; this is the same for the Republic of Ireland. This paper describes computing education in these five jurisdictions and reports on the results of a survey conducted with computing teachers. A validated instrument was localised and used for this study, with 512 completed responses received from teachers across all five countries The results demonstrate distinct differences in the experiences of the computing teachers surveyed that align with the policy and provision for computing education in the UK and Ireland. This paper increases our understanding of the differences in computing education provision in schools across the UK and Ireland, and will be relevant to all those working to understand policy around computing education in school.

(we’ll be joined by the co-authors of the paper: Sue Sentance and Diana Kirby from the University of Cambridge and the Raspberry Pi Foundation with a lightning talk summary to start our discussion)

All welcome, as usual we’ll be meeting on zoom, details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us. Thanks to Joseph Maguire at the University of Glasgow for proposing this months paper.

References

  1. Sue Sentance, Diana Kirby, Keith Quille, Elizabeth Cole, Tom Crick and Nicola Looker (2022) Computing in School in the UK & Ireland: A Comparative Study UKICER ’22: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research 5 pp 1–7 DOI: 10.1145/3555009.3555015

Join us to discuss what counts as Computing Education Research on Monday 5th September at 2pm BST

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Picture of Glasgow Cathedral (St Mungos) on Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/5aFU

Science is a broad church, full of narrow minds, trained to know ever more about even less. That’s according to Steve Jones [1], but in Computing Education Research (CER) are we being too narrow-minded about what counts (and what doesn’t count) as a contribution? Join us to discuss via a paper by Steve Draper and Joseph Maguire at the University of Glasgow recently published in TOCE [2]. From the abstract:

The overall aim of this paper is to stimulate discussion about the activities within CER, and to develop a more thoughtful and explicit perspective on the different types of research activity within CER, and their relationships with each other. While theories may be the most valuable outputs of research to those wishing to apply them, for researchers themselves there are other kinds of contribution important to progress in the field. This is what relates it to the immediate subject of this special journal issue on theory in CER. We adopt as our criterion for value “contribution to knowledge”. This paper’s main contributions are: A set of 12 categories of contribution which together indicate the extent of this terrain of contributions to research. Leading into that is a collection of ideas and misconceptions which are drawn on in defining and motivating “ground rules”, which are hints and guidance on the need for various often neglected categories. These are also helpful in justifying some additional categories which make the set as a whole more useful in combination. These are followed by some suggested uses for the categories, and a discussion assessing how the success of the paper might be judged.

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

References

  1. Steve Jones (2007) Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise, Little Brown
  2. Steve Draper and Joseph Maguire (2022) The different types of contributions to knowledge (in CER): All needed, but not all recognised ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE) DOI:10.1145/3487053