Who?

Who are we? We are a community of educators that meet monthly to discuss peer-reviewed studies of Computer Science Education (CSE) and Computing Education Research (CER), typically published in conferences, journals and books. Anyone is welcome to join us, we encourage diversity because diverse communities are stronger communities where everyone has something to learn and everyone has something to teach.

In diverse communities, everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn. Quote by Greg Wilson in rebooting instructor training at software-carpentry.org. CC BY-SA community picture by Helpameout on Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/3YLJ adapted using the Wikipedia app

As of 2024, we’ve had people join from organisations around the UK and Ireland including Bath (bath.ac.uk), Bristol (uwe.ac.uk), Cambridge (cam.ac.uk, ocr.org.uk, raspberrypi.org), Canterbury (kent.ac.uk), Cranfield (cranfield.ac.uk), Dublin (tudublin.ie, ucd.ie), Durham (dur.ac.uk), Edinburgh (ed.ac.uk, napier.ac.uk), Glasgow (gcu.ac.uk, gla.ac.uk, strath.ac.uk), Hull (hull.ac.uk), Lancaster (lancaster.ac.uk), Leeds (leeds.ac.uk), London (kcl.ac.uk, qmul.ac.uk, roehampton.ac.uk), Manchester (ada.ac.uk, manchester.ac.uk, mmu.ac.uk, salford.ac.uk), Milton Keynes (open.ac.uk), Newcastle (ncl.ac.uk), Nottingham (nottingham.ac.uk), Ormskirk (edgehill.ac.uk), Oxford (brookes.ac.uk), Paisley (uws.ac.uk), Portsmouth (port.ac.uk), Preston (uclan.ac.uk), Sheffield (sheffield.ac.uk, shu.ac.uk) and Swansea (swansea.ac.uk) participating.

We also have participants from around the world including Allentown, Pennsylvania (muhlenberg.edu), Bergen, Norway (uib.no) Beja, Portugal (ipbeja.pt), Canton, New York (stlaw.edu), CERN in Switzerland (home.cern), Auckland, New Zealand, (auckland.ac.nz) Charlotte, North Carolina (charlotte.edu), Chicago, Illinois (northwestern.edu), Houghton, Michigan (mtu.edu), Houston, Texas (rice.edu), Amman, Jordan (psut.edu.jo), La Grande, Oregon (eou.edu), New Brunswick, New Jersey (rutgers.edu) Mahwah, New Jersey (ramapo.edu), New York, New York (pace.edu), Raleigh, North Carolina (ncsu.edu), Rome, Georgia (berry.edu), St. Louis, Missouri (wustl.edu), San Diego, California (ucsd.edu), Stanford, California (stanford.edu), Toronto, Canada (utoronto.ca), Newcastle, Australia (newcastle.edu.au) and Wellesley, Massachusetts (wellesley.edu), depending on the paper we’re discussing.

Each meetup typically has between 10 and 30 participants, with a healthy “churn” each month. Since starting in lockdown in 2020 we’ve had over different 250 individuals joining, many of whom are also part the United Kingdom uki-sigcse.acm.org community and the wider global sigcse.org/membership community.

Manchester journal club meetings are currently chaired by Duncan Hull and hosted virtually (on zoom) by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. Other groups meet in parallel in Canterbury and Glasgow.

Evidence-based Education

Our journal club will primarily be of interest to educators who are interested in how they can improve their teaching by using published and peer-reviewed evidence, both theoretical and practical. Let’s call it evidence-based education. Consequently, this journal club is also likely to be of interest to:

  • Educators who teach some flavour of computing at University, FE college or high school
  • Engineers who lead teams and are responsible for the continuing professional development (CPD) of their team
  • Teaching assistants are you a graduate teaching assistant (GTA)? Or an undergraduate teaching assistant (UTA)? Would you like to get better at doing your job while building a broader understanding of the issues?
  • Trainers who train and develop the talent of others in computing, for example at coding boot camps and the like
  • Trainees on coding and technical training courses, how could your training be improved?
  • Students: undergraduates what are your experiences of learning computer science at school, college or University? How could those experiences be improved?
  • Scientists and researchers with an interest in pedagogy. You’re interested in the theory and practice of how people learn and how that knowledge can be used to improve teaching
  • Employers who employ and train software engineers, data scientists, developers, coders and programmers etc
  • Employees your employer has sent you on a training program or bootcamp to build your computing skills. What do you need to learn new computational skills? How can you learn it?
  • Everyone and anyone who is curious.

Our doors are open, this is not an ivory tower, all are welcome. If you’d like to join, see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us.

Acknowledgements

We’d like to thank Steven Bradley, Sally Fincher, Quintin Cutts and Jane Waite for their help, advice, support and encouragement in getting this journal club started and keeping it going.

Thanks also to all our past and present journal clubbers – we can’t do it without you!