Essays and arguments about computing education
When students write programming assignments, we generally want to grade them with a number or letter grade. This may be for homework/coursework or for controlled assessments such as exams. Anyone who has worked in education will know that consistency and fairness of grading are important to students; which teacher hasn t heard How come they got Continue reading Consistency of grading programming…
I organise and play in two football [soccer] games a week, which is a big part of my life side of work/life balance. Whenever I go to conferences I miss playing and I always had in mind the idea of organising a game at a conference. My hesitation was always that I wasn t sure anyone Continue reading Sport at academic conferences
ICER 2025 took place last week and there is now a very brief limbo period before preparations begin for next year. This point, midway through my two-year term as its program co-chair seems like a useful moment to reflect on an issue I ve been thinking about this year: paper length. (This post is solely my Continue reading ICER and paper length
Our latest project is Strype, a frame-based editor for Python which runs in the browser. We released 1.0 last year which let you run console and Turtle graphics code, but we were itching to add our own graphics API (API doc here). We had experience of creating one in Greenfoot Strype s API looks similar Continue reading Strype s new graphics API
We have a new paper available at the TOCE journal today (official open-access link, or watermark-free personal copy) about LLM vs human-generated hints for novice programmers. It was authored by our team at KCL, plus LLM wizards Juho Leinonen and Paul Denny. We were interested in how we might add LLM-generated hints for stuck novice Continue reading Howzat? Evaluating Human and AI Hints for Novice…
Last week we held our privacy and legislation birds-of-a-feather at SIGCSE 2025 (pictures from National Aviary nearby). My previous post explains the background but briefly: educational software used to be unregulated which was not great; now there is new legislation on both privacy and accessibility but there are awkward rammifications for software makers. School districts Continue reading…
Next week I will be at SIGCSE 2025, where Andreas Stefik, Samantha Schwartz and I will be runnning a birds of a feather session on The implication of accessibility and privacy legislation on classroom programming tools . This doesn t sound exciting (maybe we needed a snappier title, like this blog post), but it s potentially quite important Continue reading The threat to free/open source tools in…
I m acting as one of the ICER 2025 program chairs, and that has me thinking about reviewer workload in Computing Education Research. (This post is entirely my own personal views, and does not represent the views of the other organisers, ICER as a conference, SIGCSE, etc.) When we think about reviewing, what we all want Continue reading Reviewer workload
His majesty s revenue and customs, or HMRC, is the UK equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service in the USA. Part of its remit is to check that employee expense claims are not being used for evading tax. Expense claims are not taxed but salary is, so one way to evade income tax would be to Continue reading The USA, according to His Majesty s Revenue and Customs
Recently, Aleata Hubbard Cheuoua, Eva Marinus and I acted as guest editors of a special issue at the Computer Science Education journal. The special issue was distinctive because it only accepted replication studies, and reviewed them as Registered Reports. Registered Reports are a new way to publish science: you peer review the study s design, before Continue reading Permanent Registered Reports…