AI models for general-purpose programming, such as OpenAI Codex, which powers the AI pair programming tool GitHub Copilot, have the potential to significantly impact how we teach and learn programming.
The basis of these tools is a ‘natural language to code’ approach, also called natural language programming. This allows users to generate code using a simple text-based prompt, such as “Write a simple Python script for a number guessing game”. Programming-specific AI models are trained on vast quantities of text data, including GitHub repositories, to enable users to quickly solve coding problems using natural language.
As a computing educator, you might ask what the potential is for using these tools in your classroom. In our latest research seminar, Majeed Kazemitabaar (University of Toronto) shared his work in developing AI-assisted coding tools to support students during Python programming tasks.
Majeed argued that natural language programming can enable students to focus on the problem-solving aspects of computing, and support them in fixing and debugging their code. However, he cautioned that students might become overdependent on the use of ‘AI assistants’ and that they might not understand what code is being outputted. Nonetheless, Majeed and colleagues were interested in exploring the impact of these code generators on students who are starting to learn programming.
In one study, the team Majeed works in investigated whether students’ task and learning performance was affected by an AI code generator. They split 69 students (aged 10–17) into two groups: one group used a code generator in an environment, Coding Steps, that enabled log data to be captured, and the other group did not use the code generator.
Learners who used the code generator completed significantly more authoring tasks — where students manually write all of the code — and spent less time completing them, as well as generating significantly more correct solutions. In multiple choice questions and modifying tasks — where students were asked to modify a working program — students performed similarly whether they had access to the code generator or not.
A test was administered a week later to check the groups’ performance, and both groups did similarly well. However, the ‘code generator’ group made significantly more errors in authoring tasks where no starter code was given.
Majeed’s team concluded that using the code generator significantly increased the completion rate of tasks and student performance (i.e. correctness) when authoring code, and that using code generators did not lead to decreased performance when manually modifying code.
Finally, students in the code generator group reported feeling less stressed and more eager to continue programming at the end of the study.
In a related study, Majeed and his colleagues investigated how novice programmers used the code generator and whether this usage impacted their learning. Working with data from 33 learners (aged 11–17), they analysed 45 tasks completed by students to understand:
Their analysis found that students used the code generator for the majority of task attempts (74% of cases) with far fewer tasks attempted without the code generator (26%). Of the task attempts made using the code generator, 61% involved a single prompt while only 8% involved decomposition of the task into multiple prompts for the code generator to solve subgoals; 25% used a hybrid approach — that is, some subgoal solutions being AI-generated and others manually written.
In a comparison of students against their post-test evaluation scores, there were positive though not statistically significant trends for students who used a hybrid approach (see the image below). Conversely, negative though not statistically significant trends were found for students who used a single prompt approach.
Though not statistically significant, these results suggest that the students who actively engaged with tasks — i.e. generating some subgoal solutions, manually writing others, and debugging their own written code — performed better in coding tasks.
Majeed concluded that while the data showed evidence of self-regulation, such as students writing code manually or adding to AI-generated code, students frequently used the output from single prompts in their solutions, indicating an over-reliance on the output of AI code generators.
He suggested that teachers should support novice programmers to write better quality prompts to produce better code.
If you want to learn more, you can watch Majeed’s seminar:
You can read more about Majeed’s work on his personal website. You can also download and use the code generator Coding Steps yourself.
The focus of our ongoing seminar series is on teaching programming with or without AI.
For our next seminar on Tuesday 16 April at 17:00–18:30 GMT, we’re joined by Brett Becker (University College Dublin), who will discuss how generative AI may be effectively utilised in secondary school programming education and how it can be leveraged so that students can be best prepared for whatever lies ahead. To take part in the seminar, click the button below to sign up, and we will send you information about joining. We hope to see you there.
The schedule of our upcoming seminars is online. You can catch up on past seminars on our previous seminars and recordings page.
The post Using an AI code generator with school-age beginner programmers appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We love hearing from members of the community and sharing the stories of inspiring young people, volunteers, and educators all over the world who have a passion for technology.
With this latest story, we’re taking you to Leeds, UK, to meet Micah, a young space enthusiast whose confidence has soared since he started attending a Code Club at his local library.
Computing skills are essential in today’s world, and Micah’s mum Catherine was keen for him to be introduced to coding from a young age.
While Micah is known to people close to him for his inquisitive nature, cheeky behaviour, and quick-witted sense of humour, he can be a little shy when meeting new people. And he isn’t always keen on his mum’s suggestions about trying new things and attending after-school clubs! However, when Catherine saw there was a Code Club running at their local library, she knew it was the perfect opportunity for Micah to try out computing.
What Catherine didn’t know is that not only would Micah find out he was a talented coder, but Code Club would also set the path for him to become a regular attendee at many of the library’s other clubs.
Based in Leeds, the Compton Centre Code Club is part of the Leeds Libraries network, which runs seven Code Clubs throughout the city. Liam, Senior Librarian for Digital at Leeds Libraries, described the importance of these spaces for the community and for engaging children in tech:
“Libraries are safe spaces that provide free access to exciting and innovative technology to those in our communities who might not get that opportunity. We’re proud that our Code Clubs can support young people to engage with tech, learn some new skills, and meet like-minded peers in a friendly and positive environment.
Our Code Clubs are aimed at 9- to 13-year-olds. We do have some learners that will come that have a younger sister or brother that wants to get involved as well. We never want to turn anyone away. So we’re more than welcoming for that age group to come in and have a play, get used to the equipment, and join in.”
— Liam, Senior Librarian for Digital at Leeds Libraries
Code Club provides a safe and friendly space for Micah to connect with other children, and he has embraced coding with enthusiasm. This is possible thanks to the work, support, and encouragement of Micah’s Code Club mentor Basia (they/them), the librarian at the Compton Centre who runs the club.
“Micah loves coming [to Code Club] and learning all the different things that he can do with coding. And he also loves Basia. They’re brilliant and run the club really well. It’s a super child-friendly place to be and he loves the support that he gets from them.”
– Catherine, Micah’s mum
Support from an inspiring mentor is so often an important part of a young coder’s journey, and Basia’s own journey from a coding beginner to a confident mentor highlights the positive influence Code Club has on both children and mentors.
Basia reflected on how they felt when they first heard they were going to be running Code Club sessions, and how their skills and confidence have grown.
“I was daunted for a bit. But actually one of the first things I did when I started this job was to go through some of [the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s] resources and do a project in Scratch. And it was just so simple and straightforward. You know, all the resources are absolutely great and I don’t really need to think about it. I think my confidence has increased quite significantly.”
— Basia, Librarian and Code Club mentor
Since joining Code Club, Micah has become involved in other extracurricular activities, like Lego club and drama club. These experiences have contributed to Micah’s overall personal growth, showcasing the transformative power of Code Club for children.
Micah has exciting dreams for the future, including becoming an astrophysicist, a marine biologist, and the founder of a company named Save The Planet. Supported by dedicated mentors like Basia, Code Clubs are not just about teaching coding — they are helping shape the leaders of tomorrow.
If you are interested in encouraging your child to explore coding, take a look at the free coding project resources we have available to support you. If you would like to set up a Code Club for young people in your community, head to codeclub.org for information and support.
Help us celebrate Micah and his inspiring journey by sharing his story on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Facebook.
The post Celebrating the community: Micah appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The use of generative AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT) in education is now common among young people (see data from the UK’s Ofcom regulator). As a computing educator or researcher, you might wonder what impact generative AI tools will have on how young people learn programming. In our latest research seminar, Barbara Ericson and Xinying Hou (University of Michigan) shared insights into this topic. They presented recent studies with university student participants on using generative AI tools based on large language models (LLMs) during programming tasks.
Barbara and Xinying started their seminar with an overview of their earlier research into using Parson’s Problems to scaffold university students as they learn to program. Parson’s Problems (PPs) are a type of code completion problem where learners are given all the correct code to solve the coding task, but the individual lines are broken up into blocks and shown in the wrong order (Parsons and Haden, 2006). Distractor blocks, which are incorrect versions of some or all of the lines of code (i.e. versions with syntax or semantic errors), can also be included. This means to solve a PP, learners need to select the correct blocks as well as place them in the correct order.
In one study, the research team asked whether PPs could support university students who are struggling to complete write-code tasks. In the tasks, the 11 study participants had the option to generate a PP when they encountered a challenge trying to write code from scratch, in order to help them arrive at the complete code solution. The PPs acted as scaffolding for participants who got stuck trying to write code. Solutions used in the generated PPs were derived from past student solutions collected during previous university courses. The study had promising results: participants said the PPs were helpful in completing the write-code problems, and 6 participants stated that the PPs lowered the difficulty of the problem and speeded up the problem-solving process, reducing their debugging time. Additionally, participants said that the PPs prompted them to think more deeply.
This study provided further evidence that PPs can be useful in supporting students and keeping them engaged when writing code. However, some participants still had difficulty arriving at the correct code solution, even when prompted with a PP as support. The research team thinks that a possible reason for this could be that only one solution was given to the PP, the same one for all participants. Therefore, participants with a different approach in mind would likely have experienced a higher cognitive demand and would not have found that particular PP useful.
To understand the impact of using PPs with different learners, the team then undertook a follow-up study asking whether PPs could specifically support students with lower computer science self-efficacy. The results show that study participants with low self-efficacy who were scaffolded with PPs support showed significantly higher practice performance and higher problem-solving efficiency compared to participants who had no scaffolding. These findings provide evidence that PPs can create a more supportive environment, particularly for students who have lower self-efficacy or difficulty solving code writing problems. Another finding was that participants with low self-efficacy were more likely to completely solve the PPs, whereas participants with higher self-efficacy only scanned or partly solved the PPs, indicating that scaffolding in the form of PPs may be redundant for some students.
These two studies highlighted instances where PPs are more or less relevant depending on a student’s level of expertise or self-efficacy. In addition, the best PP to solve may differ from one student to another, and so having the same PP for all students to solve may be a limitation. This prompted the team to conduct their most recent study to ask how large language models (LLMs) can be leveraged to support students in code-writing practice without hindering their learning.
This recent third study focused on the development of CodeTailor, a tool that uses LLMs to generate and evaluate code solutions before generating personalised PPs to scaffold students writing code. Students are encouraged to engage actively with solving problems as, unlike other AI-assisted coding tools that merely output a correct code correct solution, students must actively construct solutions using personalised PPs. The researchers were interested in whether CodeTailor could better support students to actively engage in code-writing.
In a study with 18 undergraduate students, they found that CodeTailor could generate correct solutions based on students’ incorrect code. The CodeTailor-generated solutions were more closely aligned with students’ incorrect code than common previous student solutions were. The researchers also found that most participants (88%) preferred CodeTailor to other AI-assisted coding tools when engaging with code-writing tasks. As the correct solution in CodeTailor is generated based on individual students’ existing strategy, this boosted students’ confidence in their current ideas and progress during their practice. However, some students still reported challenges around solution comprehension, potentially due to CodeTailor not providing sufficient explanation for the details in the individual code blocks of the solution to the PP. The researchers argue that text explanations could help students fully understand a program’s components, objectives, and structure.
In future studies, the team is keen to evaluate a design of CodeTailor that generates multiple levels of natural language explanations, i.e. provides personalised explanations accompanying the PPs. They also aim to investigate the use of LLM-based AI tools to generate a self-reflection question structure that students can fill in to extend their reasoning about the solution to the PP.
Barbara and Xinying’s seminar is available to watch here:
Find examples of PPs embedded in free interactive ebooks that Barbara and her team have developed over the years, including CSAwesome and Python for Everybody. You can also read more about the CodeTailor platform in Barbara and Xinying’s paper.
The focus of our ongoing seminar series is on teaching programming with or without AI.
For our next seminar on Tuesday 12 March at 17:00–18:30 GMT, we’re joined by Yash Tadimalla and Prof. Mary Lou Maher (University of North Carolina at Charlotte). The two of them will share further insights into the impact of AI tools on the student experience in programming courses. To take part in the seminar, click the button below to sign up, and we will send you information about joining. We hope to see you there.
The schedule of our upcoming seminars is online. You can catch up on past seminars on our previous seminars and recordings page.
The post Supporting learners with programming tasks through AI-generated Parson’s Problems appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Big news for young coders and everyone who supports them: project registration is now open for Coolest Projects 2024! Coolest Projects is our global technology showcase for young people aged up to 18. It gives young creators the incredible opportunity to share the cool stuff they’ve made with digital technology with a global audience, and receive certificates and rewards to celebrate their achievements.
The Coolest Projects online showcase is open to young people worldwide. Young creators can register their projects to share them with the world in our online project gallery, and join our exciting livestream event to celebrate what they have made with the global Coolest Projects community.
By taking part in Coolest Projects, young people can join an international community of young makers, represent their country, receive personalised feedback on their projects, and get certificates and more to recognise their achievements.
Here’s how it works:
Taking part in Coolest Projects is simple:
As well as the global online showcase, Coolest Projects in-person events are held for young people locally in certain countries too, and we encourage creators to take part in both the online showcase and their local in-person event.
In 2024, creators can look forward to the following in-person events, run by us and partner organisations around the world:
More events are coming soon, so sign up to the Coolest Projects newsletter to be sure to hear about any in-person events in your country. And if there isn’t an event near you, don’t worry. The online showcase is open to any young person anywhere in the world.
Coolest Projects welcomes all digital tech projects, from beginner to advanced, and there are loads of great resources available to help you support the young people in your community to take part.
We are running a series of online calls and webinars for mentors and young people to share practical tips and help participants develop their ideas and build their creations. Sign up for the sessions here. All sessions will be recorded, so you can watch them back if you can’t join live.
You can also check out the Coolest Projects guidance page for resources to help you support young people throughout their Coolest Projects journey, including a mentor guide and session plans.
To inspire your coders, encourage them to take a look at the 2023 showcase gallery, where they can explore the incredible projects submitted by participants last year.
Our projects site is also a great place for participants to begin — there are hundreds of free step-by-step project guides to help young people create their own projects, whether they’re experienced tech creators or they’re just getting started.
There’s lots more exciting news to come, from the announcement of our VIP judges to details about this year’s swag, so sign up for email updates to be the first to know. And whether your coders have already made something fun, innovative, or amazing that they want to share, or they’re inspired to make something new, Coolest Projects is the place for them. We can’t wait to see what they create!
The post Registration is open for Coolest Projects 2024 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Everyone who has taught children before will know the excited gleam in their eyes when the lessons include something to interact with physically. Whether it’s printed and painstakingly laminated flashcards, laser-cut models, or robots, learners’ motivation to engage with the topic will increase along with the noise levels in the classroom.
However, these hands-on activities are often seen as merely a technique to raise interest, or a nice extra project for children to do before the ‘actual learning’ can begin. But what if this is the wrong way to think about this type of activity?
In our 2023 online research seminar series, focused on computing education for primary-aged (K–5) learners, we delved into the most recent research aimed at enhancing learning experiences for students in the earliest stages of education. From a deep dive into teaching variables to exploring the integration of computational thinking, our series has looked at the most effective ways to engage young minds in the subject of computing.
It’s only fitting that in our final seminar in the series, Anaclara Gerosa from the University of Glasgow tackled one of the most fundamental questions in education: how do children actually learn? Beyond the conventional methods, emerging research has been shedding light on a fascinating approach — the concept of grounded cognition. This theory suggests that children don’t merely passively absorb knowledge; they physically interact with it, quite literally ‘grasping’ concepts in the process.
Grounded cognition, also known in variations as embodied and situated cognition, offers a new perspective on how we absorb and process information. At its core, this theory suggests that all cognitive processes, including language and thought, are rooted in the body’s dynamic interactions with the environment. This notion challenges the conventional view of learning as a purely cognitive activity and highlights the impact of action and simulation.
There is evidence from many studies in psychology and pedagogy that using hands-on activities can enhance comprehension and abstraction. For instance, finger counting has been found to be essential in understanding numerical systems and mathematical concepts. A recent study in this field has shown that children who are taught basic computing concepts with unplugged methods can grasp abstract ideas from as young as 3. There is therefore an urgent need to understand exactly how we could use grounded cognition methods to teach children computing — which is arguably one of the most abstract subjects in formal education.
A recent study in this field has shown that children who are taught basic computing concepts with unplugged methods can grasp abstract ideas from as young as 3.
Anaclara is part of a group of researchers at the University of Glasgow who are currently developing a new approach to structuring computing education. Their EIFFEL (Enacted Instrumented Formal Framework for Early Learning in Computing) model suggests a progression from enacted to formal activities.
Following this model, in the early years of computing education, learners would primarily engage with activities that allow them to work with tangible 3D objects or manipulate intangible objects, for instance in Scratch. Increasingly, students will be able to perform actions in an instrumented or virtual environment which will require the knowledge of abstract symbols but will not yet require the knowledge of programming languages. Eventually, students will have developed the knowledge and skills to engage in fully formal environments, such as writing advanced code.
In a recent literature review, Anaclara and her colleagues looked at existing research into using grounded cognition theory in computing education. Although several studies report the use of grounded approaches, for instance by using block-based programming, robots, toys, or construction kits, the focus is generally on looking at how concrete objects can be used in unplugged activities due to specific contexts, such as a limited availability of computing devices.
The next steps in this area are looking at how activities that specifically follow the EIFFEL framework can enhance children’s learning.
You can watch Anaclara’s seminar here:
You can also access the presentation slides here.
Research into grounded cognition activities in computer science is ongoing, but we encourage you to try incorporating more hands-on activities when teaching younger learners and observing the effects yourself. Here are a few ideas on how to get started:
In 2024, we are exploring different ways to teach and learn programming, with and without AI tools. In our next seminar, on 13 February at 17:00 GMT, Majeed Kazemi from the University of Toronto will be joining us to discuss whether AI-powered code generators can help K–12 students learn to program in Python. All of our online seminars are free and open to everyone. Sign up and we’ll send you the link to join on the day.
The post Grounded cognition: physical activities and learning computing appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
In our series of community stories, we celebrate some of the wonderful things young people and educators around the world are achieving through the power of technology.
In our latest story, we’re heading to Vivek High School in Mohali, India, to meet Sahibjot, a 14-year-old coding enthusiast who has taken his hobby to the next level thanks to mentorship, Code Club, and the exciting opportunity to take part in the Coolest Projects 2023 global online showcase.
When he was younger, Sahibjot loved playing video games. His interest in gaming led him to discover the world of game development, and he was inspired to find out more and try it out himself. He began to learn to code in his spare time, using tutorials to help him develop his skills.
Keen to share the joy he had experienced from gaming, Sahibjot set himself the challenge of creating a game for his cousin. This project cemented his enthusiasm for coding and developing games of his own.
“I always felt that I have played so many games in my life, why not make one and others will enjoy the same experience that I had as a child.
For my cousin, I made a personal game for him, and he played it and he liked it very much, so once he played it, I felt that, yes, this is what I want to do with my life.” – Sahibjot
While continuing to hone his computing skills at home, Sahibjot heard that his school had started a Code Club. After initially feeling nervous about joining, his enthusiasm was bolstered by the club mentor, Rajan, talking about artificial intelligence and other interesting topics during the session, and he soon settled in.
At Code Club, with support and encouragement from Rajan, Sahibjot continued to develop and grow his coding skills. Alongside his technical skills, he also learned about teamwork and working collaboratively. He embraced the opportunity to help his peers, sharing his knowledge with others and becoming a mentor for younger club members.
“Last year, we joined this coding club together and we became friends. He’s a very friendly person. Whenever we need him, he just quickly helps us. He helps us to troubleshoot, find any bugs, or even fix our codes.” – Akshat, fellow Code Club member
The next step for Sahibjot came when Rajan introduced him and his fellow Code Club members to Coolest Projects. Coolest Projects is a celebration of young digital creators and the amazing things they make with technology. It offers participants the opportunity to share their tech creations in a global, online showcase, and local in-person events celebrating young creators are also held in several countries.
Sahibjot was eager to take part and showcase what he had made. He submitted a Python project, a ping-pong game, to the online showcase, and was very excited to then see his creation receive a special shout-out during the Coolest Projects global livestream event. He was delighted to share this achievement with his friends and family, and he felt proud to be representing his school and his country on a global stage.
“I told everyone around me that there was going to be a livestream and I possibly might be featured in that, so that was really exciting. I learned a lot about just not representing my school and myself as an individual, I learned about representing my whole nation.” — Sahibjot
Sahibjot’s passion for computing has helped shape his aspirations and ambitions. Looking to the future, he hopes to use his technology skills to benefit others and make an impact.
“Using code and technology and all of the things like that, I aspire to make effort to do something with the world, like help out people with technology.” — Sahibjot
To find out how you and young creators you know can get involved in Coolest Projects, visit coolestprojects.org. If the young people in your community are just starting out on their computing journey, visit our projects site for free, fun beginner coding projects.
For more information to help you set up a Code Club in your school, visit codeclub.org.
Join us in celebrating Sahibjot’s inspiring journey by sharing his story on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Facebook.
The post Celebrating the community: Sahibjot appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
With the rapid advances in digital technologies like artificial intelligence, it’s more important than ever that every young person has the opportunity to learn how computers are being used to change the world and to develop the skills and confidence to get creative with technology.
There’s no better way to develop those abilities (super powers even) than getting hands-on experience of programming, whether that’s coding an animation, designing a game, creating a website, building a robot buggy, or training an AI classification model. That’s what tens of thousands of young people do every day in Code Clubs all over the world.
We were absolutely thrilled to organise a Code Club at Number Ten Downing Street last week, hosted by the UK Prime Minister’s wife Akshata Murty as part of Lessons at 10.
Lessons at 10 is an initiative to bring school children from all over the UK into Number Ten Downing Street, the official residence of the Prime Minister. Every week different schools visit to attend lessons led by education partners covering all kinds of subjects.
We ran a Code Club for 20 Year 7 students (ages 11 to 12) from schools in Coventry and Middlesex. The young people had a great time with the Silly eyes and Ghostbusters projects from our collections of Scratch projects. Both stone-cold classics in my opinion, and a great place to start if you’re new to programming.
You may have spotted in the photos that the young people were programming on Raspberry Pi computers (the incredible Raspberry Pi 400 made in Wales). We also managed to get our hands on some cool new monitors.
Mrs Murty’s father was one of the founders of Infosys, which ranks among the world’s most successful technology companies, founded in India and now operating all over the world. So it is perhaps no surprise that she spoke eloquently to the students about the importance of every young person learning about technology and seeing themselves as digital creators not consumers.
We were lucky enough to be in one of the rather fancy rooms in Number Ten, featuring a portrait by John Constable of his niece Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer. Mrs Murty reminded us that one of the lessons we learn from Ada Lovelace is that computer programming combines both the logical and artistic aspects of human intelligence. So true.
Since Code Club’s launch in April 2012, it has grown to be the world’s largest movement of free computing clubs and has supported over 2 million young people to get creative with technology.
Code Clubs provide a free, fun, and safe environment for young people from all backgrounds to develop their digital skills. Run by teachers and volunteers, most Code Clubs take place in schools, and there are also lots in libraries and other community venues.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation provides a broad range of projects that young people use to build their confidence and skills with lots of different hardware and software. The ultimate goal is that they are empowered to combine their logical and artistic skills to create something original. Just like Ada Lovelace did all those years ago.
All of our projects are designed to be self-directed, so young people can learn independently or in groups. That means that you don’t need to be a tech expert to set up or run a Code Club. We provide you with all the support that you need to get started.
If you want to find out more about how to set up a Code Club, visit the website here.
The post Code Club at Number Ten Downing Street appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
“Computational thinking is really about thinking, and sometimes about computing.” – Aman Yadav, Michigan State University
Computational thinking is a vital skill if you want to use a computer to solve problems that matter to you. That’s why we consider computational thinking (CT) carefully when creating learning resources here at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. However, educators are increasingly realising that CT skills don’t just apply to writing computer programs, and that CT is a fundamental approach to problem-solving that can be extended into other subject areas. To discuss how CT can be integrated beyond the computing classroom and help introduce the fundamentals of computing to primary school learners, we invited Dr Aman Yadav from Michigan State University to deliver the penultimate presentation in our seminar series on computing education for primary-aged children.
In his presentation, Aman gave a concise tour of CT practices for teachers, and shared his findings from recent projects around how teachers perceive and integrate CT into their lessons.
Aman began his talk by placing his team’s work within the wider context of computing education in the US. The computing education landscape Aman described is dominated by the National Science Foundation’s ambitious goal, set in 2008, to train 10,000 computer science teachers. This objective has led to various initiatives designed to support computer science education at the K–12 level. However, despite some progress, only 57% of US high schools offer foundational computer science courses, only 5.8% of students enrol in these courses, and just 31% of the enrolled students are female. As a result, Aman and his team have worked in close partnership with teachers to address questions that explore ways to more meaningfully integrate CT ideas and practices into formal education, such as:
At the primary education level, the CT4EDU project posed the question “What does computational thinking actually look like in elementary classrooms, especially in the context of maths and science classes?” This project involved collaboration with teachers, curriculum designers, and coaches to help them conceptualise and implement CT in their core instruction.
During professional development workshops using both plugged and unplugged tasks, the researchers supported educators to connect their day-to-day teaching practice to four foundational CT constructs:
An emerging aspect of the research team’s work has been the important relationship between vocabulary, belonging, and identity-building, with implications for equity. Actively incorporating CT vocabulary in lesson planning and classroom implementation helps students familiarise themselves with CT ideas: “If young people are using the language, they see themselves belonging in computing spaces”.
A main finding from the study is that teachers used CT ideas to explicitly engage students in metacognitive thinking processes, and to help them be aware of their thinking as they solve problems. Rather than teachers using CT solely to introduce their students to computing, they used CT as a way to support their students in whatever they were learning. This constituted a fundamental shift in the research team’s thinking and future work, which is detailed further in a conceptual article.
The work conducted for the CT4EDU project guided the approach taken in the Smithsonian Science for Computational Thinking project. This project entailed the development of a curriculum for grades 3 and 5 that integrates CT into science lessons.
Part of the project included surveying teachers about the value they place on CT, both before and after participating in professional development workshops focused on CT. The researchers found that even before the workshops, teachers make connections between CT and the rest of the curriculum. After the workshops, an overwhelming majority agreed that CT has value (see image below). From this survey, it seems that CT ties things together for teachers in ways not possible or not achieved with other methods they’ve tried previously.
Despite teachers valuing the CT approach, asking them to integrate coding into their practices from the start remains a big ask (see image below). Many teachers lack knowledge or experience of coding, and they may not be curriculum designers, which means that we need to develop resources that allow teachers to integrate CT and coding in natural ways. Aman proposes that this requires a longitudinal approach, working with teachers over several years, using plugged and unplugged activities, and working closely with schools’ STEAM or specialist technology teachers where applicable to facilitate more computationally rich learning experiences in classrooms.
Aman’s team is also engaged in a research project to integrate CT at middle school level for students aged 11 to 14. This project focuses on the question “What does CT look like in the context of social studies, English language, and art classrooms?”
For this project, the team conducted three Delphi studies, and consequently created learning pathways for each subject, which teachers can use to bring CT into their classrooms. The pathways specify practices and sub-practices to engage students with CT, and are available on the project website. The image below exemplifies the CT integration pathways developed for the arts subject, where the relationship between art and data is explored from both directions: by using CT and data to understand and create art, and using art and artistic principles to represent and communicate data.
Aman’s work highlights the broad value of CT in education. However, to meaningfully integrate CT into the classroom, Aman suggests that we have to take a longitudinal view of the time and methods required to build teachers’ understanding and confidence with the fundamentals of CT, in a way that is aligned with their values and objectives. Aman argues that CT is really about thinking, and sometimes about computing, to support disciplinary learning in primary classrooms. Therefore, rather than focusing on integrating coding into the classroom, he proposes that we should instead talk about using CT practices as the building blocks that provide the foundation for incorporating computationally rich experiences in the classroom.
Watch the recording of Aman’s presentation:
You can access Aman’s seminar slides as well.
You can find out more about connecting research to practice for primary computing education by watching the recordings of the other seminars in our series on primary (K–5) teaching and learning. In particular, Bobby Whyte discusses similar concepts to Aman in his talk on integrating primary computing and literacy through multimodal storytelling.
Our 2024 seminar series is on the theme of teaching programming, with or without AI. In this series, we explore the latest research on how teachers can best support school-age learners to develop their programming skills.
On 13 February, we’ll hear from Majeed Kazemi (University of Toronto) about his work investigating whether AI code generator tools can support K-12 students to learn Python programming.
Sign up now to join the seminar:
The post Integrating computational thinking into primary teaching appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Each year, young people all over the world share and celebrate their amazing tech creations by taking part in Coolest Projects, our digital technology showcase. Our global online showcase and local in-person events give kids a wonderful opportunity to celebrate their creativity with their communities, explore other young creators’ tech projects, and gain inspiration and encouragement for their future projects.
Now, visitors to the Young V&A museum in London can also be inspired by some of the incredible creations showcased at Coolest Projects. The museum has recently reopened after a large reimagining, and some of the inspiring projects by Coolest Projects 2022 participants are now on display in the Design Gallery, ready to spark digital creativity among more young people.
Many Coolest Projects participants showcase projects that they created to make an impact and solve a real-world problem that’s important to them, for example to help members of their local community, or to protect the environment.
One example on display in the Young V&A gallery is EleVoc, by 15-year-old Chinmayi from India. Chinmayi was inspired to create her project after she and her family faced a frightening encounter:
“My family and I are involved in wildlife conservation. One time we were charged by elephants even though we were only passing by in a Jeep. This was my first introduction to human–animal conflict, and I wanted to find a way to solve it!” – Chinmayi
The experience prompted Chinmayi to create EleVoc, an early-warning device designed to reduce human–elephant conflict by detecting and classifying different elephant sounds and alerting nearby villages to the elephants’ proximity and behaviour.
Also exhibited at the Young V&A is the hardware project Gas Leak Detector by Sashrika, aged 11, from the USA. Gas Leak Detector is a device that detects if a fuel tank for a diesel-powered heating system is leaking and notifies householders through an app in a matter of second.
Sashrika knew this invention could really make a difference to people’s lives. She explained, “Typically, diesel gas tanks for heating are in the basement where people don’t visit every day. Leakage may be unnoticed and lead to fire or major repair cost.”
As well as projects designed to solve problems, Coolest Projects also welcomes young people who create things to entertain or have fun.
At the Young V&A, visitors can enjoy the fun, fast-paced game project Runaway Nose, by 10-year-old Harshit from Ireland. Runaway Nose uses facial recognition, and players have to use their nose to interact with the prompts on the screen.
Harshit shared the motivation behind his project:
“I wanted to make a fun game to get you thinking fast and that would get you active, even on a rainy day.” – Harshit
We can confirm Runaway Nose is a lot of fun, and a must-do activity for people of all ages on a visit to the museum.
If you are in London, make sure to head to the Young V&A to see Chinmayi’s, Sashrika’s, and Harshit’s projects, and many more. We love seeing the ingenuity of the global community of young tech creators celebrated, and hope it inspires you and your young people.
With that in mind, we are excited that Coolest Projects will be back in 2024. Registrations for the global Coolest Projects online showcase will be open from 14 February to 22 May 2024, and any young creator up to age 18 anywhere in the world can get involved. We’ll also be holding in-person Coolest Projects events for young people in Ireland and the UK. Head to the Coolest Projects website to find out more.
Coolest Projects is for all young people, no matter their level of coding experience. Kids who are just getting started and would like to take part can check out the free project guides on our projects site. These offer step-by-step guidance to help everyone make a tech project they feel proud of.
To always get the latest news about all things Coolest Projects, from event updates to the fun swag coming for 2024, sign up for the Coolest Projects newsletter.
The post Celebrating young Coolest Projects creators at a London museum appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The day after the successful meetup with our Global Clubs Partner organisations based in Africa, our team and some of our partners enjoyed participating in the Coolest Projects South Africa 2023 event to meet young tech creators and help out as project judges. Here are some of our impressions.
This is the fourth year of a partner-run, regional version of Coolest Projects — our world-leading showcase for young tech creators — taking place in South Africa, led by David Campey. David is Director of Coder LevelUp, one of our Global Clubs Partners growing and supporting a network of CoderDojos and Code Clubs in the country, and involved in the CoderDojo movement for a whole decade.
There was a buzz of anticipation and excitement at the Cape Town Science Centre as young coders from age 5 to 18 and various backgrounds gathered on this sunny Saturday morning to showcase their coding creations and inventions at Coolest Projects South Africa. From fun games and animations on Scratch, to cool websites created with HTML and CSS, to fantastic Python-based hardware solutions to real-world challenges — every young creator brought along a project they’d created to proudly showcase and celebrate.
While chatting with the creators and discovering what had motivated their projects, we met up with 11-year-old Luhle, who was delighted to take us through the ‘Moon conversation’ animation she had coded in Scratch.
The animation involved a Spanish conversation between two people who journeyed to the moon and back. Luhle had created her animation because of her love for languages and in response to a challenge posed to her class by her teacher: to learn 5 languages. While her mother tongue is isiXhosa, she is confident in English, is learning Afrikaans, has started teaching herself Spanish, and would love to learn Korean.
We also met with 16-year-old Kayden, who showcased a project he’d made to address a real-world challenge. He told us he had always struggled to concentrate in class — a challenge that many young people face — and he wanted to build an alternative solution to the established medications. Using vibration sensors and two microcontrollers, he created a digital device to prompt users when they are no longer paying attention in class. With his friend Carl, he successfully tested the device on a meaningful sample of Grade 1–3 learners (ages 7–9).
Kayden is now developing this low-cost innovative solution to include a heart rate monitor to help to detect when a user loses focus, and he wants this to be a solution that’s widely accessible and affordable for all South African children. One of the judges, our partner Akwabi Paul from Tech Kidz Africa in Kenya, was greatly impressed and motivated by Kayden’s work, and took time to advise Kayden on the next steps to turn his invention into a commercial product.
During the event we also met members of Mrs Hill’s coding club and learnt about Mrs Hill’s experience of nurturing a love and interest for coding and robotics at CBC St Johns Parklands in Cape Town.
Since 2020, Mrs Hills has been providing coding lessons to all school classes — learners aged 6 to 12 years — as well as an after-school coding and robotics club. She approaches her lessons by introducing and demonstrating coding skills and then presenting her learners with a problem to solve collaboratively. In her words, ‘Learners find more interest in learning practically.’
That’s why Coolest Projects is the perfect fit for her and her young people. 4 of her club members took part in Coolest Projects South Africa 2022. This year, she was proud to enter 11 participants, 3 of whom were chosen as judges’ favourites.
After the showcasing and judging, the Coolest Projects South Africa event culminated in a hearty celebration of all that the young tech creators had presented. David Campey’s passion for nurturing coding literacy, digital making skills, and innovative thinking among learners from different walks of life made the whole day a truly enjoyable, inclusive event for the young creators.
It was inspiring, no doubt, for our other African partners who participated as judges and are now keen to host Coolest Projects events back in their home countries.
If you and your young people based anywhere on the globe feel inspired to showcase digital tech creations, you can get involved in our Coolest Projects 2024 online showcase! It’s free and open to any young tech creator up to age 18.
Sign up to the Coolest Projects newsletter to be the first to hear all updates, for example when showcase registration opens on 14 February.
The post Impressions from Coolest Projects South Africa 2023 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Today’s blog is written by Dr Alex Hadwen-Bennett, who we worked with to find out primary school learners’ experiences of engaging with culturally relevant Computing lessons. Alex is a Lecturer in Computing Education at King’s College London, where he undertakes research focusing on inclusive computing education and the pedagogy of making.
Despite many efforts to make a career in Computing more accessible, many groups of people are still underrepresented in the field. For instance, a 2022 report revealed that only 22% of people currently working in the IT industry in the UK are women. Additionally, among learners who study Computing at schools in England, Black Caribbean students are currently one of the most underrepresented groups. One approach that has been suggested to address this underrepresentation at school is culturally relevant pedagogy.
For this reason, a particular focus of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s academic research programme is to support Computing teachers in the use of culturally relevant pedagogy. This pedagogy involves developing learning experiences that deliberately aim to enable all learners to engage with and succeed in Computing, including by bringing their culture and interests into the classroom.
The Foundation’s work in this area started with the development of guidelines for culturally relevant and responsive teaching together with a group of teachers and external researchers. The Foundation’s researchers then explored how a group of Computing teachers employed the guidelines in their own teaching. In a follow-on study funded by Cognizant, the team worked with 13 primary school teachers in England to adapt Computing lessons to make them culturally relevant for their learners. In this process, the teachers adapted a unit on photo editing for Year 4 (ages 8–9), and a unit about vector graphics for Year 5 (ages 9–10). As part of the project, I worked with the Foundation team to analyse and report on data gathered from focus groups of primary learners who had engaged with the adapted units.
For the focus groups, the Foundation team asked teachers from three schools to each choose four learners to take part. All children in the three focus groups had taken part in all the lessons involving the culturally adapted resources. The children were both boys and girls, and came from diverse cultural backgrounds where possible.
The questions for the focus groups were prepared in advance and covered:
“I feel happy that I see myself represented in some way.”
“It was nice to do something that actually represented you in many different ways, like your culture and your background.”
– Statements of learners who participated in the focus groups
When the learners were asked about what they did in their Computing lessons, most of them made references to working with and manipulating graphics; fewer made references to programming and algorithms. This emphasis on graphics is likely related to this being the most recent topic the learners engaged with. The learners were also asked about their reflections on the culturally adapted graphics unit that they had recently completed. Many of them felt that the unit gave them the freedom to incorporate things that related to their interests or culture. The learners’ responses also suggested that they felt represented in the work they completed during the unit. Most of them indicated that their interests were acknowledged, whereas fewer mentioned that they felt their cultural backgrounds were highlighted.
“Anyone can be good at computing if they have the passion to do it.”
– Statement by a learner who participated in a focus group
When considering who does computing, the learners made multiple references to people who keep trying or do not give up. Whereas only a couple of learners said that computer scientists need to be clever or intelligent to do computing. A couple of learners suggested that they believed that anyone can do computing. It is encouraging that the learners seemed to associate being good at computing with effort rather than with ability. However, it is unclear whether this is associated with the learners engaging with the culturally adapted resources.
While this was a small-scale study, the focus groups findings do suggest that engaging with culturally adapted resources can make primary learners feel more represented in their Computing lessons. In particular, engaging with an adapted unit led learners to feel that their interests were recognised as well as, to a lesser extent, their cultural backgrounds. This suggests that primary-aged learners may identify their practical interests as the most important part of their background, and want to share this in class.
Finally, the responses of the learners suggest that they feel that perseverance is a more important quality than intelligence for success in computing and that anyone can do it. While it is not possible to say whether this is directly related to their engagement with a culturally adapted unit, it would be an interesting area for further research.
You can find out more about culturally relevant pedagogy and the Foundation’s research on it, for example by:
The Foundation would like to extend thanks to Cognizant for funding this research, and to the primary computing teachers and learners who participated in the project.
The post Culturally relevant Computing: Experiences of primary learners appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Underrepresentation in computing is a widely known issue, in industry and in education. To cite some statistics from the UK: a Black British Voices report from August 2023 noted that 95% of respondents believe the UK curriculum neglects black lives and experiences; fewer students from working class backgrounds study GCSE Computer Science; when they leave formal education, fewer female, BAME, and white working class people are employed in the field of computer science (Kemp 2021); only 21% of GCSE Computer Science students, 15% at A level, and 22% at undergraduate level are female (JCQ 2020, Ofqual 2020, UCAS 2020); students with additional needs are also underrepresented.
Such statistics have been the status quo for too long. Many Computing teachers already endeavour to bring about positive change where they can and engage learners by including their interests in the lessons they deliver, so how can we support them to do this more effectively? Extending the reach of computing so that it is accessible to all also means that we need to consider what formal and informal values predominate in the field of computing. What is the ‘hidden’ curriculum in computing that might be excluding some learners? Who is and who isn’t represented?
In a recent research seminar, Katharine Childs from our team outlined a research project we conducted, which included a professional development workshop to increase primary teachers’ awareness of and confidence in culturally relevant pedagogy. In the workshop, teachers considered how to effectively adapt curriculum materials to make them culturally relevant and engaging for the learners in their classrooms. Katharine described the practical steps teachers took to adapt two graphics-related units, and invited seminar participants to apply their learning to a graphics activity themselves.
Culturally relevant pedagogy is a teaching framework which values students’ identities, backgrounds, knowledge, and ways of learning. By drawing on students’ own interests, experiences and cultural knowledge educators can increase the likelihood that the curriculum they deliver is more relevant, engaging and accessible to all.
The idea of culturally relevant pedagogy was first introduced in the US in the 1990s by African-American academic Gloria Ladson-Billings (Ladson-Billings 1995). Its aim was threefold: to raise students’ academic achievement, to develop students’ cultural competence and to promote students’ critical consciousness. The idea of culturally responsive teaching was later advanced by Geneva Gay (2000) and more recently brought into focus in US computer science education by Kimberly Scott and colleagues (2015). The approach has been localised for England by Hayley Leonard and Sue Sentance (2021) in work they undertook here at the Foundation.
Katharine began her presentation by explaining that the professional development workshop in the Primary culturally adapted resources for computing project built on two of our previous research projects to develop guidelines for culturally relevant and responsive computing and understand how teachers used them in practice. This third project ran as a pilot study funded by Cognizant, starting in Autumn 2022 with a one-day, in-person workshop for 13 primary computing teachers.
Katharine then introduced us to the 10 areas of opportunity (AO) our research at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre had identified for culturally relevant pedagogy. These 10 areas were used as practical prompts to frame the workshop discussions:
At first glance it is easy to think that you do most of those things already, or to disregard some items as irrelevant to the computing curriculum. What would your own cultural identity (see AO2) have to do with computing, you might wonder. But taking a less complacent perspective might lead you to consider all the different facets that make up your identity and then to think about the same for the students you teach. You may discover that there are many areas which you have left untapped in your lesson planning.
Katharine explained how this is where the professional development workshop showed itself as beneficial for the participants. It gave teachers the opportunity to reflect on how their cultural identity impacted on their teaching practices — as a starting point to learning more about other aspects of the culturally relevant pedagogy approach.
Our researchers were interested in how they could work alongside teachers to adapt two computing units to make them more culturally relevant for teachers’ specific contexts. They used the Computing Curriculum units on Photo Editing (Year 4) and Vector Graphics (Year 5).
Katharine illustrated some of the adaptations teachers and researchers working together had made to the emoji activity above, and which areas of opportunity (AO) had been addressed; this aspect of the research will be reported in later publications.
Although the number of participants in this pilot study was small, the findings show that the professional development workshop significantly increased teachers’ awareness of culturally relevant pedagogy and their confidence in adapting resources to take account of local contexts:
These quantitative shifts in perspective indicate a positive effect of the professional development pilot.
Katharine described that in our qualitative interviews with the participating teachers, they expressed feeling that their understanding of culturally relevant pedagogy had increased and they recognized the many benefits to learners of the approach. They valued the opportunity to discuss their contexts and to adapt materials they currently used with other teachers, because it made it a more ‘authentic’ and practical professional development experience.
The seminar ended with breakout sessions inviting viewers to consider possible adaptations that could be made to the graphics activities which had been the focus of the workshop.
In the breakout sessions, attendees also discussed specific examples of culturally relevant teaching practices that had been successful in their own classrooms, and they considered how schools and computing educational initiatives could support teachers in their efforts to integrate culturally relevant pedagogy into their practice. Some attendees observed that it was not always possible to change schemes of work without a ‘whole-school’ approach, senior leadership team support, and commitment to a research-based professional development programme.
The seminar reminds us that the education system is not culture neutral and that teachers generally transmit the dominant culture (which may be very different from their students’) in their settings (Vrieler et al, 2022). Culturally relevant pedagogy is an attempt to address the inequities and biases that exist, which result in many students feeling marginalised, disenfranchised, or underachieving. It urges us to incorporate learners’ cultures and experiences in our endeavours to create a more inclusive computing curriculum; to adopt an intersectional lens so that all can thrive.
As a pilot study, the workshop was offered to a small cohort of 13, yet the findings show that the intervention significantly increased participants’ awareness of culturally relevant pedagogy and their confidence in adapting resources to take account of local contexts.
Of course there are many ways in which teachers already adapt resources to make them interesting and accessible to their pupils. Further examples of the sort of adaptations you might make using these areas of opportunity include:
Can you see an opportunity for integrating culturally relevant pedagogy in your classroom? We would love to hear about examples of culturally relevant teaching practices that you have found successful. Let us know your thoughts or questions in the comments below.
You can watch Katharine’s seminar here:
You can download her presentation slides on our ‘previous seminars’ page, and you can read her research paper.
To get a practical overview of culturally relevant pedagogy, read our 2-page Quick Read on the topic and download the guidelines we created with a group of teachers and academic specialists.
Tomorrow we’ll be sharing a blog about how the learners who engaged with the culturally adapted units found the experience, and how it affected their views of computing. Follow us on social media to not miss it!
On 12 December we’ll host the last seminar session in our series on primary (K-5) computing. Anaclara Gerosa will share her work on how to design and structure early computing activities that promote and scaffold students’ conceptual understanding. As always, the seminar is free and takes place online at 17:00–18:30 GMT / 12:00–13:30 ET / 9:00–10:30 PT / 18:00–19:30 CET. Sign up and we’ll send you the link to join on the day.
In 2024, our new seminar series will be about teaching and learning programming, with and without AI tools. If you’re signed up to our seminars, you’ll receive the link to join every monthly seminar.
The post Engaging primary Computing teachers in culturally relevant pedagogy through professional development appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
How do you best teach programming in school? It’s one of the core questions for primary and secondary computing teachers. That’s why we’re making it the focus of our free online seminars in 2024. You’re invited to attend and hear about the newest research about the teaching and learning of programming, with or without AI tools.
Building on the success and the friendly, accessible session format of our previous seminars, this coming year we will delve into the latest trends and innovative approaches to programming education in school.
Our monthly online seminars are not only for computing educators but also for everyone else who is passionate about teaching young people to program computers. The seminar participants are a diverse community of teachers, technology enthusiasts, industry professionals, coding club volunteers, and researchers.
With the seminars we aim to bridge the gap between the newest research and practical teaching. Whether you are an educator in a traditional classroom setting or a mentor guiding learners in a CoderDojo or Code Club, you will gain insights from leading researchers about how school-age learners engage with programming.
Each online seminar begins with an expert presenter delivering their latest research findings in an accessible way. We then move into small groups to encourage discussion and idea exchange. Finally, we come back together for a Q&A session with the presenter.
Here’s what attendees had to say about our previous seminars:
“As a first-time attendee of your seminars, I was impressed by the welcoming atmosphere.”
“[…] several seminars (including this one) provided valuable insights into different approaches to teaching computing and technology.”
“I plan to use what I have learned in the creation of curriculum […] and will pass on what I learned to my team.”
“I enjoyed the fact that there were people from different countries and we had a chance to see what happens elsewhere and how that may be similar and different to what we do here.”
Computing teachers know that, for some students, learning about the syntax of programming languages is very challenging. Working through Parson’s Problem activities can be a way for students to learn to make sense of the order of lines of code and how syntax is organised. But for teachers it can be hard to precisely diagnose their students’ misunderstandings, which in turn makes it hard to create activities that address these misunderstandings.
At our first 2024 seminar on 9 January, Dr Barbara Ericson and Xinying Hou (University of Michigan) will present a promising new approach to helping teachers solve this difficulty. In one of their studies, they combined Parsons Problems and generative AI to create targeted activities for students based on the errors students had made in previous tasks. Thus they were able to provide personalised activities that directly addressed gaps in the students’ learning.
All our seminars start at 17:00 UK time (18:00 CET / 12:00 noon ET / 9:00 PT) and are held online on Zoom. To ensure you don’t miss out, sign up now to receive calendar invitations, and access links for each seminar on the day.
If you sign up today, we’ll also invite you to our 12 December seminar with Anaclara Gerosa (University of Glasgow) about how to design and structure of computing activities for young learners, the final session in our 2023 series about primary (K-5) computing education.
The post Spotlight on teaching programming with and without AI in our 2024 seminar series appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Big news for young tech creators: Coolest Projects will return in 2024. The world’s leading showcase for young creators of digital tech will be open for registration in the online gallery, and we want young people worldwide to showcase their tech projects.
In 2024, we are hosting the Coolest Projects online showcase and livestream celebration for all young creators around the world, and also in-person events in the UK and Ireland for young creators who live there.
All young tech creators can take part — for free — in the Coolest Projects online showcase:
Coolest Projects is an opportunity for young tech creators to share what they have made with the world. Young people register their tech creations to show them in the Coolest Projects online showcase gallery. Alongside mentors, parents, friends, and family members in their local and global communities, they can explore the gallery and celebrate what they and their peers have made.
If your kids want to learn about creating with technology, check out our free guided coding project paths. These paths are designed to support all young people to learn how to make their own tech projects and develop their coding skills. For example:
Young creators can take a look at the Coolest Projects 2023 online showcase gallery for inspiration if they are not sure what they want to make. You can also watch the story of Zaahra and Eesa, siblings who participated in Coolest Projects 2020.
If you are a young creator in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, or the UK, then Coolest Projects is also coming to you in person in 2024. Participants will be able to meet other young tech creators, connect to their community, and celebrate each other’s creations. Young people are encouraged to take part in both the Coolest Projects global online showcase and their local in-person event.
Coolest Projects Ireland will take place at DCU St Patrick’s College Campus, Drumcondra in Dublin. It’s open to young creators in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and their families and friends are invited to come along to celebrate them and see all the incredible projects on show. Participants can apply for partial bursaries for the costs of attending the event.
Very soon we will announce the date and venue for Coolest Projects UK for all young creators in the UK. Sign up for email updates to be the first to hear about it. We will also share full details of each in-person event on the Coolest Projects website when registration opens.
If there’s not an in-person Coolest Projects event near you, you can still join in the fun: the Coolest Projects online showcase is open to any young creator aged up to 18, from anywhere in the world. We also work with brilliant partner organisations around the world to bring Coolest Projects events to their countries and communities. Sign up to the Coolest Projects newsletter to be the first to know about any in-person event in your country.
Coolest Projects registration opens soon in 2024, and young creators can start thinking of ideas and working on their projects now. Or if young people have already made something they are really proud of, they can showcase that creation once registration is open.
Sign up for email updates to always get the latest news about all things Coolest Projects, from event updates to the fun swag coming for 2024.
The post Coolest Projects is back in 2024 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Since launching our free online courses about computing on the edX platform back in August, we’ve been training course facilitators and analysing the needs of educators around the world. We want every course participant to have a great experience learning with us — read on to find out what we’re doing right now and into 2024 to ensure this.
Educators of all kinds are key for supporting children and young people to engage with computing technology and develop digital skills. You might be a professional teacher, or a parent, volunteer, youth worker, librarian… there are so many roles in which people share knowledge with young learners.
That’s why our online courses are designed to support any kind of educator to:
We are constantly improving our online courses based on your feedback, the latest education research, and the insights our team members gain through supporting you on your course learning journeys. Three principles guide these improvements: accessibility, scalability, and sustainability.
Our online courses are used by people who live around the world and bring various knowledge and experiences. Some participants are classroom teachers, others have computing experience from their job and want to volunteer at a kids’ coding club, and some may be parents who want to support their children. It’s important to us that our courses are relevant and accessible to all kinds of adult learners.
We’re currently working to:
When we think about the scalability of our courses, we think about how to best support as many educators around the world as possible. If we can make the jobs of all educators easier, whatever their setting is like, then we are making the right choices.
We’re currently working to:
The educators who take our courses work to achieve amazing things, and this means they are often busy. That they take the time to complete one of our courses to learn new things is a commitment we want to make sure is rewarded. The learning you get from participating in our online courses should continue to benefit you far beyond the time you spend completing it. This is what we mean by sustainability.
We’re currently working to:
Our work to improve the accessibility, scalability, and sustainability of our courses will continue into 2024, and these three principles will likely be part of our online training strategy for the following year too.
If you’d like to support young people in your life to learn about computing and digital technologies, take one of our free courses now and learn something new. We have twenty courses available right now and they are totally free.
We are also looking for adult testers for new course content. So if you’re any kind of educator and would like to test upcoming online course content and share your feedback and experiences, please send us a message with the subject ‘Educator training’.
The post Evolving our online courses to help more people be computing educators appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We all know that learning to program, and specifically learning how to debug or fix code, can be frustrating and leave beginners overwhelmed and disheartened. In a recent blog article, our PhD student Lauria at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre highlighted the pivotal role that teachers play in shaping students’ attitudes towards debugging. But what about teachers who are coding novices themselves?
In many countries, primary school teachers are holistic educators and often find themselves teaching computing despite having little or no experience in the field. In a recent seminar of our series on computing education for primary-aged children, Luisa Greifenstein told attendees that struggling with debugging and negative attitudes towards programming were among the top ten challenges mentioned by teachers.
Luisa is a researcher at the University of Passau, Germany, and has been working closely with both teacher trainees and experienced primary school teachers in Germany. She’s found that giving feedback to students can be difficult for primary school teachers, and especially for teacher trainees, as programming is still new to them. Luisa’s seminar introduced a tool to help.
To address this issue, the University of Passau has initiated the primary::programming project. One of its flagship tools, LitterBox, offers a unique solution to debugging and is specifically designed for Scratch, a beginners’ programming language widely used in primary schools.
LitterBox serves as a static code debugging tool that transforms code examination into an engaging experience. With a nod to the Scratch cat, the tool visualises the debugging of Scratch code as checking the ‘litterbox’, categorising issues into ‘bugs’ and ‘smells’:
What sets LitterBox apart is that it also rewards correct code by displaying ‘perfumes’. For instance, it will praise correct broadcasting or the use of custom blocks. For every identified problem or achievement, the tool provides short and direct feedback.
Luisa and her team conducted a study to gauge the effectiveness of LitterBox. In the study, teachers were given fictitious student code with bugs and were asked to first debug the code themselves and then explain in a manner appropriate to a student how to do the debugging.
The results were promising: teachers using LitterBox outperformed a control group with no access to the tool. However, the team also found that not all hints proved equally helpful. When hints lacked direct relevance to the code at hand, teachers found them confusing, which highlighted the importance of refining the tool’s feedback mechanisms.
Despite its limitations, LitterBox proved helpful in another important aspect of the teachers’ work: coding task creation. Novice students require structured tasks and help sheets when learning to code, and teachers often invest substantial time in developing these resources. While LitterBox does not guide educators in generating new tasks or adapting them to their students’ needs, in a second study conducted by Luisa’s team, teachers who had access to LitterBox not only received support in debugging their own code but also provided more scaffolding in task instructions they created for their students compared to teachers without LitterBox.
One important realisation that we had in the Q&A phase of Luisa’s seminar was that many different research teams are working on solutions for similar challenges, and that the impact of this research can be maximised by integrating new findings and resources. For instance, what the LitterBox tool cannot offer could be filled by:
As we navigate the evolving landscape of programming education, it’s clear that innovative tools like LitterBox can make a significant difference in the journey of both educators and students. By equipping educators with effective debugging and task creation solutions, we can create a more positive and engaging learning experience for students.
If you’re an educator, consider exploring how such tools can enhance your teaching and empower your students in their coding endeavours.
You can watch the recording of Luisa’s seminar here:
If you’re interested in the latest developments in computing education, join us at one of our free, monthly seminars. In these sessions, researchers from all over the world share their innovative ideas and are eager to discuss them with educators and students. In our December seminar, Anaclara Gerosa (University of Edinburgh) will share her findings about how to design and structure early-years computing activities.
This will be the final seminar in our series about primary computing education. Look out for news about the theme of our 2024 seminar series, which are coming soon.
The post Support for new computing teachers: A tool to find Scratch programming errors appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
In our series of community stories, we celebrate some of the amazing young people and educators who are using their passion for technology to create positive change in the world around them.
In our latest story, we’re sharing the inspiring journey of St Joseph’s Secondary School in Rush, Ireland. Over the past few years, the school community has come together to encourage coding and digital skills, harnessing the European Astro Pi Challenge as an opportunity to kindle students’ enthusiasm for tech and teamwork.
We caught up with some of the educators and students at St Joseph’s, fresh off the success of their participation in another round of Astro Pi, to delve a little deeper into the school’s focus on making opportunities to engage with computing technologies accessible to all.
St Joseph’s Secondary School is in the heart of Rush, a rural town steeped in agricultural heritage. The school houses a diverse student population coming from the local multigenerational farming families as well as families who’ve been drawn to Rush more recently by its beautiful countryside and employment opportunities. St Joseph’s leadership team has responded to the changing demographics and increase of its student population by adapting and growing the school’s curriculum to meet the evolving needs of the young people and help them build a strong community.
One of the school’s most popular initiatives has been teaching coding from first year (ages 12–13). This proactive approach has resonated with many students, including Kamaya, a member of the school’s 2022/23 Astro Pi cohort, who first discovered her passion for space science and computing through the movie Interstellar.
I remember the first time I was like, ‘OK, space is cool’ is when I watched a movie. It was called Interstellar. I [realised] I might want to do something like that in my future. So, when I came to [St Joseph’s] secondary school, I saw coding as a subject and I was like, ‘Mum, I’ve got to do coding.’
Kamaya, student at St Joseph’s
A key person encouraging St Joseph’s students to give coding a try has been Mr Murray, or Danny as he is fondly referred to by students and staff alike. Danny was introduced to the importance of engaging with computing technologies while teaching science at a school in England: he attended a Code Club where he saw kids building projects with Raspberry Pis, and he couldn’t wait to get involved. Growing his knowledge from there, Danny changed subject focus when he moved back to Ireland. He took on the challenge of helping St Joseph’s expand their computer science offering, along with leading on all IT-related issues.
When the school introduced mandatory coding taster sessions for all first-year students, Danny was blown away by the students’ eagerness and wanted to provide further opportunities for them to see what they could achieve with digital technologies.
This is where Astro Pi came in. After hearing about this exciting coding challenge through an acquaintance, Danny introduced it to his computer science class, as well as extending an open invitation to all St Joseph’s students. The uptake was vast, especially once he shared that the young people could become the recipients of some very exciting photos.
You get to see photos of Earth that nobody has ever seen. Imagine just talking to somebody and saying, ‘Oh, there’s a picture of the Amazon. I took that picture when I was 14. From space.’
Danny Murray, computing teacher at St Joseph’s
Danny’s mission is to instil in his students the belief that they can achieve anything. Collaborating on Astro Pi projects has enabled young people at St Joseph’s to team up and uncover their strengths, and has helped foster a strong community.
The students’ sense of community has transcended Danny’s classroom, creating a culture of enthusiasm for digital skills at St Joseph’s. Today, a dedicated team of students is in charge of solving tech-related challenges within the school, as Deputy Principal Darren Byrne explains:
Our own students actually go class to class, repairing tech issues. So, every day there are four or five students going around checking PCs in classrooms. They […] give classes to our first-year students on app usage.
Darren Byrne, Deputy Principal at St Joseph’s
It’s invested in the whole school [now], the idea that students can look after this kind of technology themselves. We’re the ones reaching out for help from the students!
To find out how you can get involved in Astro Pi, visit astro-pi.org for further information, deadlines, and more. If you would like to learn more about the other free resources we have available to help you inspire a coding community in your school, head to www.raspberrypi.org/teach.
Help us celebrate St Joseph’s Secondary School by sharing their story on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Facebook.
The post Celebrating the community: St Joseph’s Secondary School appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Block-based programming applications like Scratch and ScratchJr provide millions of children with an introduction to programming; they are a fun and accessible way for beginners to explore programming concepts and start making with code. ScratchJr, in particular, is designed specifically for children between the ages of 5 and 7, enabling them to create their own interactive stories and games. So it’s no surprise that they are popular tools for primary-level (K–5) computing teachers and learners. But how can teachers assess coding projects built in ScratchJr, where the possibilities are many and children are invited to follow their imagination?
In the latest seminar of our series on computing education for primary-aged children, attendees heard about two research studies that explore the use of ScratchJr in K–2 education. The speaker, Apittha (Aim) Unahalekhala, is a graduate researcher at the DevTech Research Group at Tufts University. The two studies looked at assessing young children’s ScratchJr coding projects and understanding how they create projects. Both of the studies were part of the Coding as Another Language project, which sees computer science as a new literacy for the 21st century, and is developing a literacy-based coding curriculum for K–2.
ScratchJr offers children 28 blocks to choose from when creating a coding project. Some of these are simple, such as blocks that determine the look of a character or setting, while others are more complex, such as messaging blocks and loops. Children can combine the blocks in many different ways to create projects of different levels of complexity.
At the start of her presentation, Aim described a rubric that she and her colleagues at DevTech have developed to assess three key aspects of a ScratchJr coding project. These aspects are coding concepts, project design, and purposefulness.
The rubric lets educators or researchers:
As part of the study, Aim and her colleagues collected coding projects from two schools at the start, middle, and end of a curriculum unit. They used the rubric to evaluate the coding projects and found that project scores increased over the course of the unit.
They also found that, overall, the scores for the project design elements were higher than those for coding concepts: many learners enjoyed spending lots of time designing their characters and settings, but made less use of other features. However, the two scores were correlated, meaning that learners who devoted a lot of time to the design of their project also got higher scores on coding concepts.
The rubric is a useful tool for any teachers using ScratchJr with their students. If you want to try it in your classroom, the validated rubric is free to download from the DevTech research group’s website.
The rubric assesses the output created by a learner using ScratchJr. But learning is a process, not just an end outcome, and the final project might not always be an accurate reflection of a child’s understanding.
By understanding more about how young children create coding projects, we can improve teaching and curriculum design for early childhood computing education.
In the second study Aim presented, she set out to explore this question. She conducted a qualitative observation of children as they created coding projects at different stages of a curriculum unit, and used Google Analytics data to conduct a quantitative analysis of the steps the children took.
Her findings highlighted the importance of encouraging young learners to explore the full variety of blocks available, both by guiding them in how to find and use different blocks, and by giving them the time and tools they need to explore on their own.
She also found that different teaching strategies are needed at different stages of the curriculum unit to support learners. This helps them to develop their understanding of both basic and advanced blocks, and to explore, customise, and iterate their projects.
Early-unit strategy:
Mid-unit strategy:
End-of-unit strategy:
You can watch Aim’s full presentation here:
You can also access the seminar slides here.
At our next seminar, we welcome Aman Yadav (Michigan State University), who will present research on computational thinking in primary school. The session will take place online on Tuesday 7 November at 17:00 UK time. Don’t miss out and sign up now:
To find out more about connecting research to practice for primary computing education, you can find the rest of our upcoming monthly seminars on primary (K–5) teaching and learning and watch the recordings of previous seminars in this series.
The post Young children’s ScratchJr coding projects: Assessment and support appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
In the 2023 Coolest Projects online showcase, 5801 young people from all over the world shared the wonderful, fun, and creative things they had made with technology. But that’s not all we’ve seen of Coolest Projects this year. As well as our worldwide annual online showcase, a number of in-person Coolest Projects events are taking place in countries across the globe in 2023.
Run by us or partner organisations, these exciting events create a space for young people to meet other young tech creators, connect to their community, and celebrate each others’ creations. In-person Coolest Projects events around the world had to pause over the coronavirus pandemic, and we’re delighted to see them return to engage and inspire young people once again.
On 1 July, we were super excited to host Coolest Projects Ireland, our first in-person Coolest Projects event since 2020. 63 young tech creators from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland came together in Dublin for an exciting one-day event where they shared 43 incredible creations, with engineer and STEM communicator Dr Niamh Shaw leading everyone through the day’s celebrations.
One young maker showcasing her project was Charlotte from Kinsale CoderDojo in the Republic of Ireland. Her creative storytelling project ‘Goldicat and the Three Angry Property Owners’ was chosen as a judges’ favourite in the Scratch category.
Charlotte’s story includes different games and three secret endings for the user to discover. She told us: “I know someone who made an animation based off the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel in Scratch. This inspired me to make a game based off a different fairy tale, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”
Harshit entered the Hardware category with his amazing mini vending machine. Describing his project, he explained, “This is a recreation of a vending machine, but I have added my own twists to it to make it simple to build. You still get the full experience of an actual vending machine, but what makes it special is that it is made fully out of recycled materials.”
Young people at Coolest Projects Ireland were joined and supported by family, friends, and mentors from Code Clubs and CoderDojos. Mentors told us their favourite things about attending a Coolest Projects event in person were “the joy and excitement the participants got from taking part and discussing their project with the judges”, and “the way it was very inclusive to all children and all [were] included on stage for some swag!”
In 2023 we’re partnering with six organisations that are bringing Coolest Projects events for their communities. We’re still looking forward to the exciting Coolest Projects events planned for the rest of the year:
Back in June, more than 30 young creators participated in Coolest Projects Hungary, which was organised in Budapest by the team at EPAM Systems Inc. And April saw our partner CoderDojo Belgium organise Coolest Projects Belgium for 40 young people, who shared 25 projects across different categories from Scratch to Hardware and Advanced Programming.
The CoderDojo Belgium team shared how important the Coolest Projects event is to their community:
“Just like every year, we’ve unlocked the doors to welcome the next generation of tech enthusiasts. And this year, once again, we were absolutely amazed by the projects they brought to the spotlight. From an app predicting stock market evolution, to creatively designed games with unexpected twists, not to mention the incredible robots, and more, their ingenuity knows no bounds.”
CoderDojo Belgium
We’re excited that the Coolest Projects online showcase — open to any young creator anywhere in the world — will return in 2024. And if there isn’t a Coolest Projects in-person event in your country yet, don’t worry. We’re working with more and more partners every year to bring Coolest Projects events to more young people.
To stay up to date with news about the Coolest Projects online showcase, sign up to the newsletter.
And you can celebrate young tech creators with us year round wherever you are by following Coolest Projects on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook, where we share inspiring projects from the Coolest Projects online gallery and photos from the in-person events.
We’d like to thank EPAM Systems Inc, Meta, and GoTo for supporting the Coolest Projects Ireland event. If you’re interested in partnering with us for Coolest Projects, please reach out to us via email.
The post Celebrating young tech creators in person: Coolest Projects events 2023 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
From 27 to 29 September 2023, we and the University of Cambridge are hosting the WiPSCE International Workshop on Primary and Secondary Computing Education Research for educators and researchers. This year, this annual conference will take place at Robinson College in Cambridge. We’re inviting all UK-based teachers of computing subjects to apply for one of five ‘all expenses paid’ places at this well-regarded annual event.
WiPSCE is where teachers and researchers discuss research that’s relevant to teaching and learning in primary and secondary computing education, to teacher training, and to related topics. You can find more information about the conference, including the preliminary programme, at wipsce.org.
As a teacher at the conference, you will:
We are delighted to welcome Google as a sponsor of WiPSCE. Google believes that every student deserves the opportunity to access the benefits of a computing education to help shape their future. However, many students aren’t getting the education they need, and teachers don’t have sufficient resources to provide it. Google recognises the responsibility they have to support organisations, universities, and schools with deep expertise and a commitment to computing education, especially within communities that have been historically underserved.
With support from Google, we will offer free places to five UK computing teachers, covering:
To apply, you just need to fill in a short form. The application deadline is Wednesday 19 July.
To be eligible to apply:
The application form will ask your for:
After the 19 July deadline, we’re aiming to inform you of the outcome of your application on Friday 21 July.
Your application will be reviewed by the 2023 WiPSCE Chairs:
Sue and Mareen will:
We’d be delighted to receive your application. Being able to facilitate teachers’ attendance at the conference is very much aligned with our approach to research. Both at the Foundation and the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, we’re committed to conducting research that’s directly relevant to schools and teachers, and to working in close collaboration with teachers.
We hope you are interested in attending WiPSCE and becoming an advocate for research-informed computing education practice. If your application is unsuccessful, we hope you consider coming along anyway. We’re looking forward to meeting you there. In the meantime, you can keep up with WiPSCE news on Twitter.
The post Apply for a free UK teacher’s place at the WiPSCE conference appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Who chooses to study Computing? In England, data from GCSE and A level Computer Science entries in 2019 shows that the answer is complex. Black Caribbean students were one of the most underrepresented groups in the subject, while pupils from other ethnic backgrounds, such as White British, Chinese, and Asian Indian, were well-represented. This picture is reflected in the STEM workforce in England, where Black people are also underrepresented.
That’s why one of our areas of academic research aims to support Computing teachers to use culturally relevant pedagogy to design and deliver equitable learning experiences that enable all learners to enjoy and succeed in Computing and Computer Science at school. Our previous research projects within this area have involved developing guidelines for culturally relevant and responsive teaching, and exploring how a small group of primary and secondary Computing teachers used these guidelines in their teaching.
In our latest research study, funded by Cognizant, we worked with 13 primary school teachers in England on adapting computing lessons to incorporate culturally relevant and responsive principles and practices. Here’s an insight into the workshop we ran with them, and what the teachers and we have taken away from it.
In the group of 13 England-based primary school Computing teachers we worked with for this study:
In November 2022, we held a one-day workshop with the teachers to introduce culturally relevant pedagogy and explore how to adapt two six-week units of computing resources.
The first part of the workshop was a collaborative, discussion-based professional development session exploring what culturally relevant pedagogy is. This type of pedagogy uses equitable teaching practices to:
The rest of the workshop day was spent putting this learning into practice while planning how to adapt two units of computing lessons to make them culturally relevant for the teachers’ particular settings. We used a design-based approach for this part of the workshop, meaning researchers and teachers worked collaboratively as equal stakeholders to decide on plans for how to alter the units.
We worked in four groups, each with three or four teachers and one or two researchers, focusing on one of two units of work from The Computing Curriculum for teaching digital skills: a unit on photo editing for Year 4 (ages 8–9), and a unit about vector graphics for Year 5 (ages 9–10).
In order to plan how the resources in these units of work could be made culturally relevant for the participating teachers’ contexts, the groups used a checklist of ten areas of opportunity. This checklist is a result of one of our previous research projects on culturally relevant pedagogy. Each group used the list to identify a variety of ways in which the units’ learning objectives, activities, learning materials, and slides could be adapted. Teachers noted down their ideas and then discussed them with their group to jointly agree a plan for adapting the unit.
By the end of the day, the groups had designed four really creative plans for:
Before and after the workshop, we asked the teachers to fill in a survey about themselves, their experiences of creating computing resources, and their views about culturally relevant resources. We then compared the two sets of data to see whether anything had changed over the course of the workshop.
After teachers had attended the workshop, they reported a statistically significant increase in their confidence levels to adapt resources to be culturally relevant for both themselves and others.
Teachers explained that the workshop had increased their understanding of culturally relevant pedagogy and of how it could impact on learners. For example, one teacher said:
“The workshop has developed my understanding of how culturally adapted resources can support pupil progress and engagement. It has also highlighted how contextual appropriateness of resources can help children to access resources.” – Participating teacher
Some teachers also highlighted how important it had been to talk to teachers from other schools during the workshop, and how they could put their new knowledge into practice in the classroom:
“The dedicated time and value added from peer discourse helped make this authentic and not just token activities to check a box.” – Participating teacher
“I can’t wait to take some of the work back and apply it to other areas and subjects I teach.” – Participating teacher
After our research team made the adaptations to the units set out in the four plans made during the workshop, the adapted units were delivered by the teachers to more than 500 Year 4 and 5 pupils. We visited some of the teachers’ schools to see the units being taught, and we have interviewed all the teachers about their experience of delivering the adapted materials. This observational and interview data, together with additional survey responses, will be analysed by us, and we’ll share the results over the coming months.
In our next blog post about this work, we will delve into the fascinating realm of parental attitudes to culturally relevant computing, and we’ll explore how embracing diversity in the digital landscape is shaping the future for both children and their families.
We’ve also written about this professional development activity in more detail in a paper to be published at the UKICER conference in September, and we’ll share the paper once it’s available.
Finally, we are grateful to Cognizant for funding this academic research, and to our cohort of primary computing teachers for their enthusiasm, energy, and creativity, and their commitment to this project.
The post Running a workshop with teachers to create culturally relevant Computing lessons appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We love hearing from members of the community and how they use their passion for computing and digital making to inspire others. Our community stories series takes you on a tour of the globe to meet educators and young tech creators from the USA, Iraq, Romania, and more.
For our latest story, we are in the UK with Spencer, a Computer Science teacher at King Edward VI Sheldon Heath Academy (KESH), Birmingham. After 24 years as a science teacher, Spencer decided to turn his personal passion for digital making into a career and transitioned to teaching Computer Science.
From the moment he printed his name on the screen of an Acorn Electron computer at age ten, Spencer was hooked on digital making. He’s remained a member of the digital making community throughout his life, continuing to push himself with his creations and learn new skills whenever possible. Wanting to spread his knowledge and make sure the students at his school had access to computer science, he began running a weekly Code Club in his science lab:
“Code Club was a really nice vehicle for me to get students into programming and digital making, before computer science was an option at the school. So Code Club originally ran in my science lab around the Bunsen burners and all the science equipment, and we do some programming on a Friday afternoon making LEDs flash and a little bit of Minecraft. And from that, the students really got an exciting sense of what programming and digital making could be.”
– Spencer
While running his Code Club, Spencer really embedded himself in the Raspberry Pi community, attending Raspberry Jams, engaging with like-minded people on Twitter, and continuing to rely on our free training to upskill.
When leadership at KESH began to explore introducing Computer Science to the curriculum, Spencer knew he was the right person for the job, and just where to look to make sure he had the right support:
“So when I decided to change from being a science teacher to a computer science teacher, there were loads of course options you could find online, and a lot of them required some really specific prior knowledge and skills. The Foundation’s resources take you from a complete novice, complete beginner — my very first LED flashing on and off — to being able to teach computational thinking and algorithms. So it was a really clear progression from using the Foundation resources that helped take me from a Physics teacher, who could use electricity to light an LED, to a programmer who could teach how to use this in our digital making for our students.”
– Spencer
Thanks to the support from KESH and Spencer’s compelling can-do attitude, he was soon heading up a brand-new Computer Science department. This was met with great enthusiasm from the learners at KESH, with a willing cohort eagerly signing up for the new subject.
“It’s really exciting to see how students have embraced Computer Science as a brand-new subject at school. The take-up for our first year at GCSE was fantastic with 25 students, and this year I’ve really got students asking about, ‘Is there an option for next year, and how can I get on to it?’ Students are almost blown away by the resources now.”
– Spencer
Spencer has a mission to make sure all of KESH’s learners can learn about computing, and making his lessons accessible to all means he’s become a firm favourite amongst the students for his collaborative teaching approach.
“Mr Organ teaches you, and then he just puts you in. If you do need help, you can ask people around you, or him, but he lets you make your own mistakes and learn from there. He will then give you help so you don’t make those mistakes the next time.”
– Muntaha, 16, GCSE Computer Science student, KESH
Spencer’s work is shaped by his awareness that many of the learners at KESH come from under-resourced areas of Birmingham and backgrounds that are underrepresented in computing. He knows that many of them have previously had limited opportunities to use digital tools. This is something he is driven to change.
“I want my young students here, regardless of their background, regardless of their area they’ve been brought up in, to have the same experiences as all other students in the country. And the work I do with Raspberry Pi, and the work I do with Code Club, is a way of opening those doors for our young people.”
– Spencer
As a passionate member of the Raspberry Pi Foundation community, Spencer has been counted on as a friendly face for many years, sharing his enthusiasm on training courses, at Foundation events, and as a part of discussions on Twitter. With the goal to introduce Computer Science at A level shortly, and an ever-growing collection of digital makes housed in his makerspace, Spencer shows no signs of slowing down.
If you are interested in changing your teaching path to focus on Computer Science, take a look at the free resources we have available to support you on your journey.
Help us celebrate Spencer and his dedication to opening doors for his learners by sharing his story on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
The post Celebrating the community: Spencer appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We are delighted to announce that we’ve joined the partner network of edX, the global online learning platform. Through our free online courses we enable any educator to teach students about computing and how to create with digital technologies. Since 2017, over 250,000 people have taken our online courses, including 19,000 teachers in England alone. The move to edX builds on this success to help us bring high-quality training to many more teachers worldwide.
“I feel that this course was essential in my understanding of where I may take my students on their journey as coders. Extremely practical advice and exercises.”
– Online course participant
Supporting teachers and educators is crucial for our mission to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies. Through our online courses educators can learn the skills, knowledge, and confidence to teach computing in an engaging way. As a result, they empower young people to in turn develop the knowledge, skills, and confidence to use digital technologies effectively, and to be able to critically evaluate these technologies and confidently engage with technological change.
Twenty of our most popular online courses are now available for sign-up on the edX platform. They will start in two blocks of ten in August and September, respectively.
The courses are written with educators in mind, and are also useful to anyone with an interest in computing. The scope of topics is broad and includes programming in Python and Scratch, web development and design, cybersecurity, and machine learning and AI. Our aim is to support educators of all levels of experience to learn about computing, including teachers, club volunteers, youth workers, parents, and more. The courses also draw on content from our Computing Curriculum and provide support for teachers who want to engage their students with Experience AI, our pioneering education initiative about the field of AI.
“Our partnership with edX gives teachers everywhere a new way to engage with our free, expert-led computing education training. As people design and deploy new and powerful digital technologies, it’s important that no-one is left behind and we are all able to shape technology together.”
– Sian Harris, Chief Education Officer at the Raspberry Pi Foundation
Designed, created, and facilitated by us, each of our courses is a cross-team project. When we put together a course we:
Offering our courses on the edX platform gives us flexibility in how we present the content, meaning we can better meet learner needs.
“Not only did the course present a thorough grounding in computing pedagogy, references were made to supporting research, and the structure and presentation was deceptively straightforward — despite dealing with some tricky concepts.”
– Online course participant
We especially strive to exemplify the pedagogical approaches we recommend to teachers within the courses themselves. For example, semantic waves are woven throughout our learning resources and help learners to unpack new concepts, then repack them into more complex contexts to encourage knowledge acquisition. This teaching strategy, along with many others, is used widely in the courses and in all our teaching and learning resources.
Taking our courses on edX you can:
All the courses can be completed at your own pace, in your own time. Based on a commitment of between 1 to 2 hours per week, you can complete our courses in 2 to 4 weeks. You’re also welcome to work through them more quickly (or slowly) if you prefer.
Browse our selection of free courses and decide what your next learning adventure will be.
We look forward to catching up with you in the course discussions on our new platform.
The post The Raspberry Pi Foundation and edX: A new way to learn about teaching computing appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
An absolutely huge congratulations to each and every single young creator who participated in Coolest Projects 2023, our digital technology showcase for young people! 5801 young people from 37 countries took part. This year’s participants made projects that entertained, inspired, and wowed us — creators showcased everything from robotic arms to platformer games.
We celebrated every project and maker in a special livestream event this Tuesday:
Each year, we invite VIP judges to pick their favourite projects. This year they had the difficult job of choosing between 4111 incredible projects young people showcased. Meet the judges and find out which projects were their favourites.
Yewande is a chartered engineer, innovator, and speaker. She has worked on projects in the UK, Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia, and has been named the UK Young Woman Engineer of the Year by the Institution of Engineering & Technology.
See Yewande’s favourites:
Vaishali is an Indian engineer, innovator, and revolutionary educationist. She is the co-founder of Young Tinker Academy and Young Tinker Foundation, started in 2015 to educate the less-privileged students of rural India. Her team at Young Tinker Foundation has impacted the lives of 150,000+ students.
Lella is an award-winning 18-year-old Digital Changemaker and Power of Youth Champion. Since she taught herself to code at age 8, Lella fosters purpose-driven innovation to create global industry opportunities that ensure young people are at the forefront of the ongoing digital transformation.
Lella’s favourite projects are:
Aoife is the Head of Community Development for Meta Data Centres in Europe and Asia. She and her team deliver on Meta’s commitment to playing a positive role and investing in the long-term vitality of Meta Data Centre communities in Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, and Singapore.
See Aoife’s favourite projects:
Broadcom Foundation has partnered with us for Coolest Projects to encourage young people who are solving problems that impact their communities. Broadcom Coding with Commitment™ is a special recognition for a Coolest Projects creator aged 11–14 who has learned basic coding as an essential problem-solving tool in STEM and is “thinking globally while acting locally.”
The Broadcom Coding with Commitment™ recognition goes to Smart Farm, a project by Dang, Chi, and An from Vietnam. They designed Smart Farm to help farmers in their community regulate the temperature of animals, feed them on time, and check them for diseases. The team also built a fish pond model that tests the pH of the water and a vegetable garden model that detects when vegetables are wilting, all with the aim of helping local farmers to care for their livestock and protect their livelihoods. Huge congratulations to the team!
Our judges have chosen their favourite projects — but what about yours? You can explore thousands of incredible projects for 2023 young creators in the Coolest Projects showcase gallery and discover your favourites today.
All young creators who took part will shortly receive their own unique certificate to recognise their amazing achievements. They’ll also be able to log into their Coolest Projects account to find personalised feedback on their projects from our judging team.
Support from our Coolest Projects sponsors means we can make the online showcase and celebration livestream an inspiring experience for the young people taking part. We want to say a big thank you to all of them: Allianz Technologies, Broadcom Foundation, EPAM Systems, Liberty Global, Meta, and Qube Research and Technologies.
The post Celebrating 5801 young people’s digital creations at Coolest Projects 2023 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Every day, most of us both consume and create data. For example, we interpret data from weather forecasts to predict our chances of a good weather for a special occasion, and we create data as our carbon footprint leaves a trail of energy consumption information behind us. Data is important in our lives, and countries around the world are expanding their school curricula to teach the knowledge and skills required to work with data, including at primary (K–5) level.
In our most recent research seminar, attendees heard about a research-based initiative called Data Education in Schools. The speakers, Kate Farrell and Professor Judy Robertson from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, shared how this project aims to empower learners to develop data literacy skills and succeed in a data-driven world.
“Data literacy is the ability to ask questions, collect, analyse, interpret and communicate stories about data.”
– Kate Farrell & Prof. Judy Robertson
Scotland’s national curriculum does not explicitly mention data literacy, but the topic is embedded in many subjects such as Maths, English, Technologies, and Social Studies. Teachers in Scotland, particularly in primary schools, have the flexibility to deliver learning in an interdisciplinary way through project-based learning. Therefore, the team behind Data Education in Schools developed a set of cross-curricular data literacy projects. Educators and education policy makers in other countries who are looking to integrate computing topics with other subjects may also be interested in this approach.
The Data Education in Schools projects are aimed not just at giving learners skills they may need for future jobs, but also at equipping them as data citizens in today’s world. A data citizen can think critically, interpret data, and share insights with others to effect change.
Kate and Judy shared an example of data citizenship from a project they had worked on with a primary school. The learners gathered data about how much plastic waste was being generated in their canteen. They created a data visualisation in the form of a giant graph of types of rubbish on the canteen floor and presented this to their local council.
As a result, the council made changes that reduced the amount of plastic used in the canteen. This shows how data citizens are able to communicate insights from data to influence decisions.
Across its projects, the Data Education in Schools initiative uses a problem-solving cycle called the PPDAC cycle. This cycle is a useful tool for creating educational resources and for teaching, as you can use it to structure resources, and to concentrate on areas to develop learner skills.
The five stages of the cycle are:
Smaller data literacy projects may focus on one or two stages within the cycle so learners can develop specific skills or build on previous learning. A large project usually includes all five stages, and sometimes involves moving backwards — for example, to refine the problem — as well as forwards.
At primary school, the aim of data literacy projects is to give learners an intuitive grasp of what data looks like and how to make sense of graphs and tables. Our speakers gave some great examples of playful approaches to data. This can be helpful because younger learners may benefit from working with tangible objects, e.g. LEGO bricks, which can be sorted by their characteristics. Kate and Judy told us about one learner who collected data about their clothes and drew the results in the form of clothes on a washing line — a great example of how tangible objects also inspire young people’s creativity.
As learners get older, they can begin to work with digital data, including data they collect themselves using physical computing devices such as micro:bit microcontrollers or Raspberry Pi computers.
You can access the seminar slides here.
For many attendees, one of the highlights of the seminar was seeing the range of high-quality teaching resources for learners aged 3–18 that are part of the Data Education in Schools project. These include:
More resources are due to be published later in 2023, including a set of prompt cards to guide learners through the PPDAC cycle, a handbook for teachers to support the teaching of data literacy, and a set of virtual data-themed escape rooms.
You may also be interested in the units of work on data literacy skills that are part of The Computing Curriculum, our complete set of classroom resources to teach computing to 5- to 16-year-olds.
At our next seminar we welcome Aim Unahalekhaka from Tufts University, USA, who will share research about a rubric to evaluate young learners’ ScratchJr projects. If you have a tablet with ScratchJr installed, make sure to have it available to try out some activities. The seminar will take place online on Tuesday 6 June at 17.00 UK time, sign up now to not miss out.
To find out more about connecting research to practice for primary computing education, you can see a list of our upcoming monthly seminars on primary (K–5) teaching and learning and watch the recordings of previous seminars in this series.
The post Introducing data science concepts and skills to primary school learners appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Broadening participation and finding new entry points for young people to engage with computing is part of how we pursue our mission here at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It was also the focus of our March online seminar, led by our own Dr Bobby Whyte. In this third seminar of our series on computing education for primary-aged children, Bobby presented his work on ‘designing multimodal composition activities for integrated K-5 programming and storytelling’. In this research he explored the integration of computing and literacy education, and the implications and limitations for classroom practice.
Motivated by challenges Bobby experienced first-hand as a primary school teacher, his two studies on the topic contribute to the body of research aiming to make computing less narrow and difficult. In this work, Bobby integrated programming and storytelling as a way of making the computing curriculum more applicable, relevant, and contextualised.
Critically for computing educators and researchers in the area, Bobby explored how theories related to ‘programming as writing’ translate into practice, and what the implications of designing and delivering integrated lessons in classrooms are. While the two studies described here took place in the context of UK schooling, we can learn universal lessons from this work.
In the seminar Bobby made a distinction between applying computing to literacy (or vice versa) and true integration of programming and storytelling. To achieve true integration in the two studies he conducted, Bobby used the idea of ‘multimodal composition’ (MMC). A multimodal composition is defined as “a composition that employs a variety of modes, including sound, writing, image, and gesture/movement [… with] a communicative function”.
Storytelling comes together with programming in a multimodal composition as learners create a program to tell a story where they:
To investigate the use of MMC in the classroom, Bobby started by designing a curriculum unit of lessons. He mapped the unit’s MMC activities to specific storytelling and programming learning objectives. The MMC activities were designed using design-based research, an approach in which something is designed and tested iteratively in real-world contexts. In practice that means Bobby collaborated with teachers and students to analyse, evaluate, and adapt the unit’s activities.
The first of two studies to explore the design and implementation of MMC activities was conducted with 10 K-5 students (age 9 to 11) and showed promising results. All students approached the composition task multimodally, using multiple representations for specific purposes. In other words, they conveyed different parts of their stories using either text, sound, or images.
Bobby found that broadcast messages and loops were the least used blocks among the group. As a consequence, he modified the curriculum unit to include additional scaffolding and instructional support on how and why the students might embed these elements.
In the second study, the MMC activities were evaluated in a classroom of 28 K-5 students led by one teacher over two weeks. Findings indicated that students appreciated the longer multi-session project. The teacher reported being satisfied with the project work the learners completed and the skills they practised. The teacher also further integrated and adapted the unit into their classroom practice after the research project had been completed.
Factors that impacted the integration of storytelling and programming included the teacher’s confidence to teach programming as well as the teacher’s ability to differentiate between students and what kind of support they needed depending on their previous programming experience.
In addition, there are considerations regarding the curriculum. The school where the second study took place considered the activities in the unit to be literacy-light, as the English literacy curriculum is ‘text-heavy’ and the addition of multimodal elements ‘wastes’ opportunities to produce stories that are more text-based.
Bobby’s research indicates that MMC provides useful opportunities for learners to simultaneously pursue storytelling and programming goals, and the curriculum unit designed in the research proved adaptable for the teacher to integrate into their classroom practice. However, Bobby cautioned that there’s a need to carefully consider both the benefits and trade-offs when designing cross-curricular integration projects in order to ensure a fair representation of both subjects.
Can you see an opportunity for integrating programming and storytelling in your classroom? Let us know your thoughts or questions in the comments below.
You can watch Bobby’s full presentation:
And you can read his research paper Designing for Integrated K-5 Computing and Literacy through Story-making Activities (open access version).
You may also be interested in our pilot study on using storytelling to teach computing in primary school, which we conducted as part of our Gender Balance in Computing programme.
At our next seminar, we welcome Kate Farrell and Professor Judy Robertson (University of Edinburgh). This session will introduce you to how data literacy can be taught in primary and early-years education across different curricular areas. It will take place online on Tuesday 9 May at 17.00 UK time, don’t miss out and sign up now.
Yo find out more about connecting research to practice for primary computing education, you can find other our upcoming monthly seminars on primary (K–5) teaching and learning and watch the recordings of previous seminars in this series.
The post Integrating primary computing and literacy through multimodal storytelling appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
We meet many young people with an astounding passion for tech, and we also meet the incredible volunteers and educators who help them find their feet in the digital world. Our series of community stories is one way we share their journeys with you.
Today we’re introducing you to Nadia from Maysan, Iraq. Nadia’s achievements speak for themselves, and we encourage you to watch her video to see some of the remarkable things she has accomplished.
Nadia’s journey with the Raspberry Pi Foundation started when she moved to England to pursue a PhD at Brunel University. As an international student, she wanted to find a way to be part of the local community and make the most of her time abroad. Through her university’s volunteer department, she was introduced to Code Club and began supporting club sessions for children in her local library. The opportunity to share her personal passion for all things computer science and coding with young people felt like the perfect fit.
“[Code Club] added to my skills. And at the same time, I was able to share my expertise with the young children and to learn from them as well.”
Nadia Al-Aboody
Soon, Nadia saw that the skills young people learned at her Code Club weren’t just technical, but included team building and communication as well. That’s when she realised she needed to take Code Club with her when she moved back home to Iraq.
With personal awareness of just how important it is to encourage girls to engage with computing and digital technologies, Nadia set about training the Code Club network’s first female-only training team. Her group of 15 trainers now runs nine clubs — and counting— throughout Iraq, with their goal being to open a club in every single school in the country.
Reaching new areas can be a challenge, one that Nadia is addressing by using Code Club resources offline:
“Not every child has a smartphone or a device, and that was one of the biggest challenges. The [Raspberry Pi] Foundation also introduced the unplugged activities, which was amazing. It was very important to us because we can teach computer science without the need for a computer or a smart device.”
Nadia Al-Aboody
Nadia also works with a team of other volunteers to translate our free resources related to Code Club and other initiatives for young people into Arabic, making them accessible to many more young people around the world.
Tamasin Greenough Graham, Head of Code Club here at the Foundation, shares just how important volunteers like Nadia are in actively pushing our shared mission forwards.
“Volunteers like Nadia really show us why we do the work we do. Our Code Club team exists to support volunteers who are out there on the ground, making a real difference to young people. Nadia is a true champion for Code Club, and goes out of her way to help give more children access to learning about computing. By translating resources, alongside overseeing a growing network of clubs, she helps to support more volunteers and, in turn, reach more young people. Having Nadia as a member of the community is really valuable.”
Tamasin Greenough Graham, Head of Code Club
If you are interested in becoming a Code Club volunteer, visit codeclub.org for all the information you need to get started.
Help us celebrate Nadia and her commendable commitment to growing the Code Club community in Iraq by sharing her story on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
The post Celebrating the community: Nadia appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
People have many different reasons to think that children and teenagers need to learn about artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Whether it’s that AI impacts young people’s lives today, or that understanding these technologies may open up careers in their future — there is broad agreement that school-level education about AI is important.
But how do you actually design lessons about AI, a technical area that is entirely new to young people? That was the question we needed to answer as we started Experience AI, our exciting collaboration with DeepMind, a leading AI company.
As part of Experience AI, we are creating a free set of lesson resources to help teachers introduce AI and machine learning (ML) to KS3 students (ages 11 to 14). In England this area is not currently part of the national curriculum, but it’s starting to appear in all sorts of learning materials for young people.
While developing the six Experience AI lessons, we took a research-informed approach. We built on insights from the series of research seminars on AI and data science education we had hosted in 2021 and 2022, and on research we ourselves have been conducting at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre.
We reviewed over 500 existing resources that are used to teach AI and ML.
As part of this research, we reviewed over 500 existing resources that are used to teach AI and ML. We found that the vast majority of them were one-off activities, and many claimed to be appropriate for learners of any age. There were very few sets of lessons, or units of work, that were tailored to a specific age group. Activities often had vague learning objectives, or none at all. We rarely found associated assessment activities. These were all shortcomings we wanted to avoid in our set of lessons.
To analyse the content of AI education resources, we use a simple framework called SEAME. This framework is based on work I did in 2018 with Professor Paul Curzon at Queen Mary University of London, running professional development for educators on teaching machine learning.
The SEAME framework gives you a simple way to group learning objectives and resources related to teaching AI and ML, based on whether they focus on social and ethical aspects (SE), applications (A), models (M), or engines (E, i.e. how AI works). We hope that it will be a useful tool for anyone who is interested in looking at resources to teach AI.
The four levels of the SEAME framework do not indicate a hierarchy or sequence. Instead, they offer a way for teachers, resource developers, and researchers to talk about the focus of AI learning activities.
The SE level covers activities that relate to the impact of AI on everyday life, and to its implications for society. Learning objectives and their related resources categorised at this level introduce students to issues such as privacy or bias concerns, the impact of AI on employment, misinformation, and the potential benefits of AI applications.
The A level refers to activities related to applications and systems that use AI or ML models. At this level, learners do not learn how to train models themselves, or how such models work. Learning objectives at this level include knowing a range of AI applications and starting to understand the difference between rule-based and data-driven approaches to developing applications.
The M level concerns the models underlying AI and ML applications. Learning objectives at this level include learners understanding the processes used to train and test models. For example, through resources focused on the M level, students could learn about the different learning paradigms of ML (i.e., supervised, unsupervised, or reinforcement learning).
The E level is related to the engines that make AI models work. This is the most hidden and complex level, and for school-aged learners may need to be taught using unplugged activities and visualisations. Learning objectives could include understanding the basic workings of systems such as data-driven decision trees and artificial neural networks.
Some learning activities may focus on a single level, but activities can also span more than one level. For example, an activity may start with learners trying out an existing ‘rock-paper-scissors’ application that uses an ML model to recognise hand shapes. This would cover the applications level. If learners then move on to train the model to improve its accuracy by adding more image data, they work at the models level.
Other activities cover several SEAME levels to address a specific concept. For example, an activity focussed on bias might start with an example of the societal impact of bias (SE level). Learners could then discuss the AI applications they use and reflect on how bias impacts them personally (A level). The activity could finish with learners exploring related data in a simple ML model and thinking about how representative the data is of all potential application users (M level).
The set of lessons on AI we are developing in collaboration with DeepMind covers all four levels of SEAME.
The set of Experience AI lessons we are developing in collaboration with DeepMind covers all four levels of SEAME. The lessons are based on carefully designed learning objectives and specifically targeted to KS3 students. Lesson materials include presentations, videos, student activities, and assessment questions.
For researchers, we think the SEAME framework will, for example, be useful to analyse school curriculum material to see whether some age groups have more learning activities available at one level than another, and whether this changes over time. We may find that primary school learners work mostly at the SE and A levels, and secondary school learners move between the levels with increasing clarity as they develop their knowledge. It may also be the case that some learners or teachers prefer activities focused on one level rather than another. However, we can’t be sure: research is needed to investigate the teaching and learning of AI and ML across all year groups.
That’s why we’re excited to welcome Salomey Afua Addo to the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre. Salomey joined the Centre as a PhD student in January, and her research will focus on approaches to the teaching and learning of AI. We’re looking forward to seeing the results of her work.
If you’d like to get involved with Experience AI as an educator and use our lessons with your class, you can start by visiting us at experience-ai.org.
The post AI education resources: What do we teach young people? appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Every young learner needs a successful start to their learning journey in the primary computing classroom. One aspect of this for teachers is to introduce programming to their learners in a structured way. As computing education is introduced in more schools, the need for research-informed strategies and approaches to support beginner programmers is growing. Over recent years, researchers have proposed various strategies to guide teachers and students, such as the block model, PRIMM, and, in the case of this month’s seminar, TIPP&SEE.
We are committed to make computing and creating with digital technologies accessible to all young people, including through our work with educators and researchers. In our current online research seminar series, we focus on computing education for primary-aged children (K–5, ages 5 to 11). In the series’ second seminar, we were delighted to welcome Dr Jean Salac, researcher in the Code & Cognition Lab at the University of Washington.
Jean’s work sits across computing education and human-computer interaction, with an emphasis on justice-focused computing for youth. She talked to the seminar attendees about her work on developing strategies to support primary school students learning to program in Scratch. Specifically, Jean described an approach called TIPP&SEE and how teachers can use it to guide their learners through programming activities.
TIPP&SEE is a metacognitive approach for programming in Scratch. The purpose of metacognitive strategies is to help students become more aware of their own learning processes.
TIPP&SEE scaffolds students as they learn from example Scratch projects: TIPP (Title, Instructions, Purpose, Play) is a scaffold to read and run a Scratch project, while SEE (Sprites, Events, Explore) is a scaffold to examine projects more deeply and begin to adapt them.
TIPP&SEE is inspired by the work of Irene Lee and colleagues who proposed a progressive three-stage approach called Use-Modify-Create. Following that approach, learners move from reading pre-existing programs (“not mine”) to adapting and creating their own programs (“mine”) and gradually increase ownership of their learning.
Proponents of scaffolded approaches like Use-Modify-Create argue that engaging learners in cycles of using existing programs (e.g. worked examples) before they move to adapting and creating new programs encourages ownership and agency in learning. TIPP&SEE builds on this model by providing additional scaffolding measures to support learners.
Jean presented some promising results from her research on the use of TIPP&SEE in classrooms. In one study, fourth-grade learners (age 9 to 10) were randomly assigned to one of two groups: (i) Use-Modify-Create only (the control group) or (ii) Use-Modify-Create with TIPP&SEE. Jean found that, compared to learners in the control group, learners in the TIPP&SEE group:
In another study, Jean compared how learners in the TIPP&SEE and control groups performed on several cognitive tests. She found that, in the TIPP&SEE group, students with learning difficulties performed as well as students without learning difficulties. In other words, in the TIPP&SEE group the performance gap was much narrower than in the control group. In our seminar, Jean argued that this indicates the TIPP&SEE scaffolding provides much-needed support to diverse groups of students.
TIPP&SEE is a multi-step strategy where learners start by looking at the surface elements of a program, and then move on to examining the underlying code. In the TIPP phase, learners first read the title and instructions of a Scratch project, identify its purpose, and then play the project to see what it does.
In the second phase, SEE, learners look inside the Scratch project to click on sprites and predict what each script is doing. They then make changes to the Scratch code and see how the project’s output changes. By changing parameters, learners can observe which part of the output changes as a result and then reason how each block functions. This practice is called deliberate tinkering because it encourages learners to observe changes while executing programs multiple times with different parameters.
You can read more of Jean’s research on TIPP&SEE on her website. There’s also a video on how TIPP&SEE can be used, and free lesson resources based on TIPP&SEE are available in Elementary Computing for ALL and Scratch Encore.
Jean’s talk highlighted the need for computing to be inclusive and to give equitable access to all learners. The field of computing education is still in its infancy, though our understanding of how young people learn about computing is growing. We ourselves work to deepen our understanding of how young people learn through computing and digital making experiences.
In our own research, we have been investigating similar teaching approaches for programming, including the use of the PRIMM approach in the UK, so we were very interested to learn about different approaches and country contexts. We are grateful to Dr Jean Salac for sharing her work with researchers and teachers alike. Watch the recording of Jean’s seminar to hear more:
If you are looking for more free resources to help you structure your computing lessons:
In the next seminar of our online series on primary computing, I will be presenting my research on integrated computing and literacy activities. Sign up now to join us for this session on Tues 7 March:
As always, the seminars will take place online on the first Tuesday of the month at 17:00–18:30 UK time. Hope to see you there!
The post Supporting beginner programmers in primary school using TIPP-SEE appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Computing combines a very broad mixture of concepts and skills. We work to support any school to teach students about the whole of computing and how to create with digital technologies. A key part of this support is The Computing Curriculum.
The Computing Curriculum is our complete bank of free lesson plans and other resources that offer you everything you need to teach computing lessons to all school-aged learners. It helps you cover the full breadth of computing, including computing systems, programming, creating media, data and information, and societal impacts of digital technology.
The 500 hours of free, downloadable resources within The Computing Curriculum include all the materials you need in your classroom: from lesson plans and slide decks to activity sheets, homework, and assessments. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive set of free teaching and learning materials for computing and digital skills in the world.
Our Curriculum’s resources are based on clear progression and content frameworks we’ve designed, and we continuously update them based on the latest research and feedback from practising teachers. Doing this is particularly important for computing education resources, because computing is a young subject where thoughts and understanding about the best teaching approaches are still evolving.
With The Computing Curriculum, we support educators of all levels of experience. Whether you specialise in computing, or you are a newcomer to the subject, the Curriculum will save you time and help you deliver engaging lessons.
In our 2022 survey of teachers who have used The Computing Curriculum resources:
- 91% said the Curriculum was effective or very effective at saving teachers time
- 89% said it was effective or very effective at developing teachers’ subject knowledge
- 81% said it was effective or very effective at engaging students
The resources are organised as themed units, and they support your computing lesson planning, preparation, and delivery because they are comprehensive as well as adaptable. You are free to use the resources as they are, or adjust them to your context, access to hardware, and learners’ needs and experience level.
One aspect of The Computing Curriculum that will facilitate your teaching is the progression framework on which the resources are based. In creating the resources, we have considered the learning objectives throughout each unit and year group, and throughout the entire schooling period. This progression is detailed in curriculum maps and learning graphs, and you’ll be able to use these documents to plan your lessons and to check your learners’ understanding.
You can download and use the resources for the year groups you teach computing right now. And please tell us of your experiences using The Computing Curriculum in your classroom, so that we can make the resources even better for educators around the world.
If you are interested in curriculum resources tailored for your region, please contact us via this form. You can find out how we adapted resources from The Computing Curriculum for learners living in a refugee camp in Kenya if you’d like to learn about our approach to tailoring resources.
The post Teach your learners with The Computing Curriculum appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Young creators, it’s time to share your ideas with the world! Registration for Coolest Projects is now open.
Coolest Projects is an online showcase celebrating all young people who create with digital technology. From today, Monday 6 February, young people can register their projects on the Coolest Projects website. Registered projects will be part of the online showcase gallery, for people all over the world to see.
By entering your digital tech creations into Coolest Projects, you’ll have the chance to get personalised feedback about your project, represent your country in the online showcase, and get fun, limited-edition swag. Your project could even be selected as a favourite by our very special VIP judges.
Coolest Projects is an online celebration of young digital tech creators worldwide, their skills, and their wonderful creative ideas. We welcome all kinds of projects, from big to small, beginner to advanced, and work in progress to completed creation.
Here’s what you need to know:
If you’d like help with your idea or project, take a look at our free, step-by-step Coolest Projects workbook and coding project guides. You can also get inspired by all the creations in the 2022 showcase gallery.
You are also very welcome to register a tech project you’ve already made and want to share with the world this year.
We offer free resources to help mentors and parents support young people through the process of taking part in Coolest Projects, from imagining ideas, to creating projects, to registration.
There are loads more announcements to come, so make sure to subscribe to the Coolest Projects newsletter to be the first to find out about this year’s VIP judges, limited-edition digital swag, and much more.
The post Register your project for Coolest Projects 2023 now appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
In our first seminar of 2023, we were delighted to welcome Dr Katie Rich and Carla Strickland. They spoke to us about teaching the programming construct of variables in Grade 3 and 4 (age 8 to 10).
We are hearing from a diverse range of speakers in our current series of monthly online research seminars focused on primary (K-5) computing education. Many of them work closely with educators to translate research findings into classroom practice to make sure that all our younger learners have positive first experiences of learning computing. An important goal of their research is to impact the development of pedagogy, resources, and professional development to support educators to deliver computing concepts with confidence.
Dr Katie Rich (American Institutes of Research) and Carla Strickland (UChicago STEM Education) are both part of a team that worked on a research project called Everyday Computing, which aims to integrate computational thinking into primary mathematics lessons. A key part of the Everyday Computing project was to develop coherent learning resources across a number of school years. During the seminar, Katie and Carla presented on a study in the project that revolved around teaching variables in Grade 3 and 4 (age 8 to 10) by linking this computing concept to mathematical concepts such as area, perimeter, and fractions.
Variables are used in both mathematics and computing, but in significantly different ways. In mathematics, a variable, often represented by a single letter such as x or y, corresponds to a quantity that stays the same for a given problem. However, in computing, a variable is an identifier used to label data that may change as a computer program is executed. A variable is one of the programming constructs that can be used to generalise programs to make them work for a range of inputs. Katie highlighted that the research team was keen to explore the synergies and tensions that arise when curriculum subjects share terms, as is the case for ‘variable’.
At the start of the project, in order to be able to develop coherent learning resources across school years, the team reviewed research papers related to teaching the programming construct of variables. In the papers, they found a variety of learning goals that related to facts (what learners need to know) and skills (what learners need to be able to do). They grouped these learning goals and arranged the groups into ‘levels of thinking’, which were then mapped onto a learning trajectory to show progression pathways for learning.
Carla then shared three practical examples of learning resources their research team created that integrated the programming construct of variables into a maths curriculum. The three activities, described below, form part of a series of lessons called Action Fractions. You can read more about the series of lessons in this research paper.
Robot Boxes is an unplugged activity that is positioned at the Data User level of thinking. It relates to creating instructions for a fictional robot. Learners have to pay attention to different data the robot needs in order to draw a box, such as the length and width, and also to the value that the robot calculates as area of the box. The lesson uses boxes on paper as concrete representations of variables to which learners can physically add values.
Ambling Animals is set at the ‘Data Storer’ and ‘Variable Interpreter’ levels of thinking. It includes a Scratch project to help students to locate and compare fractions on number lines. During this lesson, find a variable that holds the value of the animal that represents the larger of two fractions.
Adding Fractions draws on facts and skills from the ‘Variable Interpreter’ and ‘Variable Implementer’ levels of thinking and also includes a Scratch project. The Scratch project visualises adding fractions with the same denominator on a number line. The lesson starts to explain why variables are so important in computer programs by demonstrating how using a variable can make code more efficient.
Teaching about the programming construct of variables can be challenging, as it requires young learners to understand abstract ideas. The research Katie and Carla presented shows how integrating these concepts into a mathematics curriculum is one way to highlight tangible uses of variables in everyday problems. The levels of thinking in the learning trajectory provide a structure helping teachers to support learners to develop their understanding and skills; the same levels of thinking could be used to introduce variables in other contexts and curricula.
Many primary teachers use cross-curricular learning to increase children’s engagement and highlight real-world examples. The seminar showed how important it is for teachers to pay attention to terms used across subjects, such as the word ‘variable’, and to explicitly explain a term’s different meanings. Katie and Carla shared a practical example of this when they suggested that computing teachers need to do more to stress the difference between equations such as xy = 45 in maths and assignment statements such as length = 45 in computing.
The Everyday Computing project resources were created by a team of researchers and educators who worked together to translate research findings into curriculum materials. This type of collaboration can be really valuable in driving a research agenda to directly improve learning outcomes for young people in classrooms.
How can this research influence your classroom practice or other activities as an educator? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. We’ll be continuing to reflect on this question throughout the seminar series.
You can watch Katie’s and Carla’s full presentation here:
Our monthly seminar series on primary (K–5) teaching and learning is of interest to a global audience of educators, including those who want to understand the prior learning experiences of older learners.
We continue on Tuesday 7 February at 17.00 UK time, when we will hear from Dr Jean Salac, University of Washington. Jean will present her work in identifying inequities in elementary computing instruction and in developing a learning strategy, TIPP&SEE, to address these inequities. Sign up now, and we will send you a joining link for the session.
The post Combining computing and maths to teach primary learners about variables appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
In our work, we get to meet so many super inspiring young people who make things with technology. Our series of community stories is one way we share their journeys and enthusiasm for digital making with you.
Today we’re introducing you to Adarsh from California, USA.
We first met Adarsh at the Coolest Projects USA showcase in 2019, when he was 15 years old. Adarsh was chosen as the Coolest Projects judges’ favourite in the showcase’s Hardware category for making a Smart Sprinkler System, which can serve an entire community. He was inspired to create this project by the need he saw in California to manage water during a drought. Using a Raspberry Pi computer, he built a moisture sensor–based sprinkler system that integrates real-time weather forecast data and Twitter feeds to dispense only optimum amounts of water, in compliance with city water regulations. Adarsh says:
“The world around us right now has a lot of different problems that need to be solved and so the way that I get inspired is by looking outwards.”
In 2020, Coolest Projects Global went online with young people across the world sharing their tech projects, and Adarsh created a project for the showcase to solve another real-life problem he had witnessed. When Adarsh had been in middle school, his mother had to be rushed to hospital with a sudden heart problem. The experience of seeing her hooked up to lots of vital sign monitors, with the wires hindering her movement, stayed in his memory. It led Adarsh to create another tech project: the Contactless Vital Signs Monitor. This low-cost device can be used to monitor a person’s skin temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation without needing to be in direct contact with them. Adarsh’s contactless monitor lets patients rest more comfortably and also keeps healthcare staff safer from infections.
Adarsh entered his Contactless Vital Signs Monitor in the Davidson Fellows Scholarship programme, which recognises students who have completed significant projects that have the potential to benefit society.
Adarsh has this message for other young people who think they might like to try creating things with tech:
“None of these projects, to get to the stage where they are today, were without frustration or difficulties. That’s part of the process. You should expect that. Because of all the struggles I had, the fact that I was able to build all of this is so much more rewarding to me.”
A big part of coding and digital making is problem-solving and collaboration. Adarsh told us that he had a really great mentor, Johan, who introduced him to coding and Raspberry Pi hardware, and showed him where Adarsh could ask for help online.
“[The Raspberry Pi community] is such a large and inclusive community. It welcomes young students — even older adults who are first starting to develop their interest in computer science — and we all are developing our own skills, our own projects, and our own passions together, and while doing so, we’re helping each other out.”
Now a freshman at Stanford University, Adarsh is currently doing an epidemiology-related research project about the relationship between COVID-19 mutations and environmental, health, and demographic statistics. He wants to focus either on biomedical engineering or environmental engineering in his studies.
“Really [what I’m studying at university] is going to involve engineering or computer science largely due to the Raspberry Pi and the early influence it has had on my life.”
Thanks for inspiring us, Adarsh, and for letting us share your story with the community!
Help us celebrate Adarsh and inspire other young people to discover coding and digital making as a passion, by sharing his story on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram.
The post Celebrating the community: Adarsh appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Welcome to 2023. I hope that you had a fantastic 2022 and that you’re looking forward to an even better year ahead. To help get the year off to a great start, I thought it might be fun to share a few of the things that we’ve got planned for 2023.
Whether you’re a teacher, a mentor, or a young person, if it’s computer science, coding, or digital skills that you’re looking for, we’ve got you covered.
Through our collaboration with the European Space Agency, Astro Pi, young people can write computer programs that are guaranteed to run on the Raspberry Pi computers on the International Space Station (terms and conditions apply).
Astro Pi Mission Zero is open to participants until 17 March 2023 and is a perfect introduction to programming in Python for beginners. It takes about an hour to complete and we provide step-by-step guides for teachers, mentors, and young people.
Kids all over the world are already working on their entries to Coolest Projects Global 2023, our international online showcase that will see thousands of young people share their brilliant tech creations with the world. Registration opens on 6 February and it’s super simple to get involved. If you’re looking for inspiration, why not explore the judges’ favourite projects from 2022?
While we all love the Coolest Projects online showcase, I’m also looking forward to attending more in-person Coolest Projects events in 2023. The word on the street is that members of the Raspberry Pi team have been spotted scouting venues in Ireland… Watch this space.
I am sure I wasn’t alone in disappearing down a ChatGPT rabbit hole at the end of last year after OpenAI made their latest AI chatbot available for free. The internet exploded with both incredible examples of what the chatbot can do and furious debates about the limitations and ethics of AI systems.
With the rapid advances being made in AI technology, it’s increasingly important that young people are able to understand how AI is affecting their lives now and the role that it can play in their future. This year we’ll be building on our research into the future of AI and data science education and launching Experience AI in partnership with leading AI company DeepMind. The first wave of resources and learning experiences will be available in March.
With pandemic restrictions now almost completely unwound, we’ve seen a huge resurgence in Code Clubs and CoderDojos meeting all over the world. To build on this momentum, we are delighted to be welcoming Code Club and CoderDojo mentors and educators to a big Clubs Conference in Churchill College in Cambridge on 24 and 25 March.
This will be the first time we’re holding a community get-together since 2019 and a great opportunity to share learning and make new connections.
As part of our global mission to ensure that every young person is able to learn how to create with digital technologies, we have been focused on building partnerships in India, Kenya, and South Africa, and that work will be expanding in 2023.
In India we will significantly scale up our work with established partners Mo School and Pratham Education Foundation, training 2000 more teachers in government schools in Odisha, and running 2200 Code Clubs across four states. We will also be launching new partnerships with community-based organisations in Kenya and South Africa, helping them set up networks of Code Clubs and co-designing learning experiences that help them bring computing education to their communities of young people.
Over the past few years, our research seminar series has covered computing education topics from diversity and inclusion, to AI and data science. This year, we’re focusing on current questions and research in primary computing education for 5- to 11-year-olds.
As ever, we’re providing a platform for some of the world’s leading researchers to share their insights, and convening a community of educators, researchers, and policy makers to engage in the discussion. The first seminar takes place today (Tuesday 10 January) and it’s not too late to sign up.
That’s just a few of the super cool things that we’ve got planned for 2023. I haven’t even mentioned the new online projects we’re developing with our friends at Unity, the fun we’ve got planned with our very own online text editor, or what’s next for our curriculum and professional development offer for computing teachers.
You can sign up to our monthly newsletter to always stay up to date with what we’re working on.
The post What to expect from the Raspberry Pi Foundation in 2023 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Improving gender balance in computing is part of our work to ensure equitable learning opportunities for all young people. Our Gender Balance in Computing (GBIC) research programme has been the largest effort to date to explore ways to encourage more girls and young women to engage with Computing.
Commissioned by the Department for Education in England and led by the Raspberry Pi Foundation as part of our National Centre for Computing Education work, the GBIC programme was a collaborative effort involving the Behavioural Insights Team, Apps for Good, and the WISE Campaign.
Gender Balance in Computing ran from 2019 to 2022 and comprised seven studies relating to five different research areas:
In December we published the last of seven reports describing the results of the programme. In this blog post I summarise our overall findings and reflect on what we’ve learned through doing this research.
I was fascinated to read a paper by Deborah Butler from 2000 which starts by summarising themes from research into gender balance in computing from the 1980s and 1990s, for example that boys may have access to more role models in computing and may receive more encouragement to pursue the subject, and that software may be developed with a bias towards interests traditionally considered to be male. Butler’s paper summarises research from at least two decades ago — have we really made progress?
In England, it’s true that making Computing a mandatory subject from age 5 means we have taken great strides forward; the need for young people to make a choice about studying the subject only arises at age 14. However, statistics for England’s externally assessed high-stakes Computer Science courses taken at ages 14–16 (GCSE) and 16–18 (A level) clearly show that, although there is a small upwards trend in the proportion of female students, particularly for A level, gender balance among the students achieving GCSE/A level qualifications remains an issue:
Computer Science qualification (England): | In 2018: | In 2021: | In 2022: |
GCSE (age 16) | 20.41% | 20.77% | 21.37% |
A level (age 18) | 11.74% | 14.71% | 15.17% |
In GBIC, we carried out a range of research studies involving more than 14,500 pupils and 725 teachers in England. Implementation teams came from the Foundation, Apps For Good, the WISE Campaign, and the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT). A separate team at BIT acted as the independent evaluators of all the studies.
In total we conducted the following studies:
Each study (apart from the exploratory research study) involved a 12-week intervention in schools. Bespoke materials were developed for all the studies, and teachers received training on how to deliver the intervention they were a part of. For the RCTs, randomisation was done at school level: schools were randomly divided into treatment and control groups. The independent evaluators collected both quantitative and qualitative data to ensure that we gained comprehensive insights from the schools’ experiences of the interventions. The evaluators’ reports and our associated blog posts give full details of each study.
The research programme ran from 2019 to 2022, and as it was based in schools, we faced a lot of challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic. Many research programmes meant to take place in school were cancelled as soon as schools shut during the pandemic.
Although we were fortunate that GBIC was allowed to continue, we were not allowed to extend the end date of the programme. Thus our studies were compressed into the period after schools reopened and primarily delivered in the academic year 2021/2022. When schools were open again, the implementation of the studies was affected by teacher and pupil absences, and by schools necessarily focusing on making up some of the lost time for learning.
Quantitatively, none of the RCTs showed a statistically significant impact on the primary outcome measured, which was different in different trials but related to either learners’ attitudes to computer science or their intention to study computer science. Most of the RCTs showed a positive impact that fell just short of statistical significance. The evaluators went to great lengths to control for pandemic-related attrition, and the implementation teams worked hard to support teachers in still delivering the interventions as designed, but attrition and disruptions due to the pandemic may have played a part in the results.
The qualitative research results were more encouraging. Teachers were enthusiastic about the approaches we had chosen in order to address known barriers to gender balance, and the qualitative data indicated that pupils reacted positively to the interventions. One key theme across the Teaching Approach (and other) studies was that girls valued collaboration and teamwork. The data also offered insights that enable us to improve on the interventions.
We designed the studies so they could act as pilots that may be rolled out at a national scale. While we have gained sufficient understanding of what works to be able to run the interventions at a larger scale, two particular learnings shape our view of what a large-scale study should look like:
The GBIC results highlight that there is no quick fix and suggest that we should combine some of the approaches we’ve been trialling to provide a more holistic approach to teaching Computing in an equitable way. We would recommend that schools adopt several of the approaches we’ve tested; the materials associated with each intervention are freely available (see our blog posts for links).
One of the very interesting overall findings from this research programme was the difference in intent to study Computing between primary school and secondary school learners; fewer secondary school learners reported intent to study the subject further. This difference was observed for both girls and boys, but was more marked for girls, as shown in the graph below. This suggests that we need to double down on supporting children, especially girls, to maintain their interest in Computing as they enter secondary school at age 11. It also points to a need for more longitudinal research to understand more about the transition period from primary to secondary school and how it impacts children’s engagement with computer science and technology in general.
We think that more time (in excess of 12 weeks) is needed to both deliver the interventions and measure their outcome, as the change in learners’ attitudes may be slow to appear, and we’re hoping to engage in more longitudinal research moving forward.
We know that an understanding of computer science can improve young people’s access to highly skilled jobs involving technology and their understanding of societal issues, and we need that to be available to all. However, gender balance relating to computing and technology is a deeply structural issue that has existed for decades throughout the computing education and workplace ecosystem. That’s why we intend to pursue more work around a holistic approach to improving gender balance, aligning with our ongoing research into making computing education culturally relevant.
We are very keen to continue to build on our research on gender balance in computing. If you’d like to support us in any way, we’d love to hear from you. To explore the research projects we’re currently involved in, check out our research pages and visit the website of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.
The post Gender Balance in Computing — the big picture appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
In the final seminar in our series on cross-disciplinary computing, Dr Tracy Gardner and Rebecca Franks, who work here at the Foundation, described the framework underpinning the Foundation’s non-formal learning pathways. They also shared insights from our recently published literature review about the impact that non-formal computing education has on learners.
Tracy and Rebecca both have extensive experience in teaching computing, and they are passionate about inspiring young learners and broadening access to computing education. In their work here, they create resources and content for learners in coding clubs and young people at home.
UNESCO defines non-formal learning as “institutionalised, intentional, and planned… an addition, alternative, and/or complement to formal education within the process of life-long learning of individuals”. In terms of computing education, this kind of learning happens in after-school programmes or children’s homes as they engage with materials that have been carefully designed by education providers.
At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we support two global networks of free, volunteer-led coding clubs where regular non-formal learning takes place: Code Club, teacher- and volunteer-led coding clubs for 9- to 13-year-olds taking place in schools in more than160 countries; and CoderDojo, volunteer-led programming clubs for young people aged 7–17 taking place in community venues and offices in 100 countries. Through free learning resources and other support, we enable volunteers to run their club sessions, offering versatile opportunities and creative, inclusive spaces for young people to learn about computing outside of the school curriculum. Volunteers who run Code Clubs or CoderDojos report that participating in the club sessions positively impacts participants’ programming skills and confidence.
Rebecca and Tracy are part of the team here that writes the learning resources young people in Code Clubs and CoderDojos (and beyond) use to learn to code and create technology.
Rebecca started the seminar by describing how the team reviewed existing computing pedagogy research into non-formal learning, as well as large amounts of website visitor data and feedback from volunteers, to establish a new framework for designing and creating coding resources in the form of learning paths.
As Rebecca explained, non-formal learning paths should be designed to bridge the so-called ‘Turing tar-pit’: the gap between what learners want to do, and what they have the knowledge and resources to achieve.
To prevent learners from getting frustrated and ultimately losing interest in computing, learning paths need to:
When Rebecca and Tracy’s team create new learning paths, they first focus on the things that learners want to make. Then they work backwards to bridge the gap between learners’ big ideas and the knowledge and skills needed to create them. To do this, they use the 3…2…1…Make! framework they’ve developed.
Learning paths designed according to the framework are made up of three different types of project in a 3-2-1 structure:
You can learn more about the framework in this blog post and this guide for adults who run sessions with young people based on the learning paths. And you can explore the learning paths yourself too.
Rebecca and Tracy’s team have created several new learning pathways based on the 3…2…1…Make! framework and received much positive feedback on them. They are now looking to develop more tools and libraries to support learners, to increase the accessibility of the paths, and also to conduct research into the impact of the framework.
In the second half of the seminar, Tracy shared what the research literature says about the impact of non-formal learning. She and researchers at the Foundation particularly wanted to find out what the research says about computing education for K–12 in non-formal settings. They systematically reviewed 421 papers, identifying 88 papers from the last seven years that related to empirical research on non-formal computing education for young learners. Based on these 88 papers, they summarised the state of the field in a literature review.
So far, most studies of non-formal computing education have looked at knowledge and skill development in computing, as well as affective factors such as interest and perception. The cognitive impact of non-formal education has been generally positive. The papers Tracy and the research reviewed suggested that regular learning opportunities, such as weekly Code Clubs, were beneficial for learners’ knowledge development, and that active teaching of problem solving skills can lead to learners’ independence.
Non-formal computing education also seems to be beneficial in terms of affective factors (although it is unclear yet whether the benefits remain long-term, since most existing research studies conducted have been short-term ones). For example, out-of-school programmes can lead to more positive perception and increased awareness of computing for learners, and also boost learners’ confidence and self-efficacy if they have had little prior experience of computing. The social aspects of participating in coding clubs should not be underestimated, as learners can develop a sense of belonging and support as they work with their peers and mentors.
The literature review showed that non-formal computing complements formal in-school education in many ways. Not only can Code Clubs and CoderDojos be accessible and equitable spaces for all young people, because the people who run them can tailor learning to the individuals. Coding clubs such as these succeed in making computing fun and engaging by enabling a community to form and allowing learners to make things that are meaningful to them.
Another thing the literature review made obvious is that there are big gaps in the existing understanding of non-formal computing education that need to be researched in more detail. For example, most of the studies the papers in the literature review described took place with female students in middle schools in the US.
That means the existing research tells us little about non-formal learning:
We would also love to see studies that hone in on:
We’re excited to continue collaborating within the Foundation so that our researchers and our team creating non-formal learning content can investigate the impact of the 3…2…1…Make! framework.
This collaboration connects two of our long-term strategic goals: to engage millions of young people in learning about computing and how to create with digital technologies outside of school, and to deepen our understanding of how young people learn about computing and how to create with digital technologies, and to use that knowledge to increase the impact of our work and advance the field of computing education. Based on our research, we will iterate and improve the framework, in order to enable even more young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies.
From January, you can join our new monthly seminar series on primary (K–5) teaching and learning. In this series, we’ll hear insights into how our youngest learners develop their computing knowledge, so whether you’re a volunteer in a coding club, a teacher, a researcher, or simply interested in the topic, we’d love to see you at one of these monthly online sessions.
The first seminar, on Tuesday 10 January at 5pm UK time, will feature researchers and educators Dr Katie Rich and Carla Strickland. They will share findings on how to teach children about variables, one of the most difficult aspects of computing for young learners. Sign up now, and we will send you notifications and joining links for each seminar session.
We look forward to seeing you soon, and to discussing with you how we can apply research results to better support all our learners.
The post Combining research and practice to evaluate and improve computing education in non-formal settings appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Young tech creators, get ready: Coolest Projects will be back in 2023, and we want to make this the year of your big idea!
Coolest Projects is the world’s leading online technology showcase for young creators across the world, and we’ll soon be inviting young people to share their creations in the 2023 gallery when project registration opens on 6 February.
For young creators, Coolest Projects is the unique opportunity to share their big ideas with the whole world. All projects in our open online showcase receive personalised feedback from judges, and all creators get some awesome limited-edition swag too. To bring all the participants together, we’ll host a live-streamed celebration event online on 6 June 2023, where we’ll also reveal the favourite projects of our very special VIP judges.
Creators who took part in 2022 told us that the coolest thing about Coolest Projects is that “so many people around the world get to see and appreciate your projects” and that “anyone can have a go”.
Coolest Projects creators make digital tech projects that matter to them and that they want to share with the world. Creators have all different levels of skill — some register their very first coding project, and others have taken part in Coolest Projects for years. We welcome every project from every young person in Coolest Projects. With six project categories from Scratch to hardware, and project topics including environment, health, and fun, creators come up with all kinds of cool ideas.
Take a look at the online showcase gallery to see the projects young makers shared in the most recent showcase, including an app about recycling, a smiley face game, a trash-collecting boat, and a game to help you eat more healthily.
Registration opens on 6 February 2023, and creators can get started on their ideas and make their projects any time.
The post Coolest Projects will be back in 2023 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Today we are sharing an evaluation report on another study that’s part of our Gender Balance in Computing research programme. In this study, we investigated the impact of using relevant contexts in classroom programming activities for 12- to 13-year-olds on girls’ and boys’ attitudes towards Computing.
We have been working on Gender Balance in Computing since 2018, together with partner organisations Behavioural Insights Team, Apps for Good, and WISE, to conduct research studies exploring ways to encourage more girls and young women to engage with Computing in school. The research programme has been funded by the Department for Education, and we deliver it as part of the National Centre for Computing Education. The report we share today is about the penultimate study in the programme.
A typical Computing curriculum is built around content: a list of concepts, knowledge, and skills that will be covered during the course. For some learners, that list will be enough to motivate and engage them in Computing. But other learners require more to engage with the subject, such as context about how they can use the computing skills they learn in the real world. Crucially, this difference between learners is often gendered. Research has shown that many boys become absorbed by the content in Computing courses, whereas for many girls the context for using computing skills is more important, and this context needs to relate to a variety of relevant scenarios where computing can solve problems.
In the Relevance study, we worked together with colleagues from Apps for Good to create teaching materials that present Computing in contexts that were relevant to pupils’ own interests. To do this, we drew on a research concept called identification. This states that when learners become interested in a topic because it relates to part of their own identity, that makes the subject more personally meaningful to them, which in turn means that they are more likely to continue studying it. In the materials we created, we drew on learners’ identities based on the communities that they belonged to (see image below). The materials asked them to identify the connections they had to their own communities, and to then use this as the context to design and create a mobile phone app.
“I feel a sense of achievement in Computing when making your ideas a reality makes you proud of your creation, which is rewarding.” (Female learner, Relevance study evaluation report p. 57)
Between January 2022 and April 2022, more than 95 secondary schools were part of our study investigating the effect that learning with these resources might have on the attitudes of Year 8 pupils (aged 12–13) towards Computing. We are very grateful to all the schools, pupils, and teachers who took part in this study.
To enable evaluation of the study as a randomised controlled trial, the schools were randomly divided into two groups: a ‘control’ group that taught standard Computing lessons, and a ‘treatment’ group that delivered the intervention materials we had developed. The impact of the intervention was independently evaluated by the Behavioural Insights Team using data collected from pupils via surveys at the start and end of the intervention. The evaluators also collected data while conducting lesson observations, pupil group discussions, teacher interviews, and teacher surveys to understand how the intervention was delivered.
The girls who took part in the intervention chose an interesting range of contexts for their apps, including:
“I feel like it’s an important subject, and I feel like sea life is at risk right now, and I want to help people realise that.” (Female learner, Relevance study evaluation report p. 60)
“I feel like computing can create apps to do with solving mental health problems, which I think are very important and personally need a lot of improvement on the way we can cope with mental health.” (Female learner, Relevance study evaluation report p. 60)
The start of this blog refers to the core components of a Computing curriculum: concepts, knowledge, and skills. One way of building a curriculum is to list these components and develop a scheme of work which covers them all. However, in a recent computing education paper, researchers present an alternative way: developing curricula around the possible endpoints of learners. For computing, one endpoint could be the economic opportunities of a programming career, but equally, another could be using digital technologies for creative expression. The researchers argue that when learners have the opportunity to use computing as a tool related to personally meaningful contexts, a more diverse group of learners can become engaged in the subject.
Girls who took part in our Relevance study expressed the importance of creativity. “I think last term we had instructions and you follow them, whereas now it’s like your own ideas and your own creativity and whatever you make,” said one female learner (report, p. 56). The series of lessons where learners designed a prototype of their app was particularly popular among girls because this activity included creative expression. Girls who see themselves as creative align their interests with subjects that allow them to express this part of their identity.
Based on learner responses to a ‘yes/no’ question about whether they were likely to choose GCSE Computer Science, the evaluators of the study found no statistically significant differences between the students who were part of the treatment and control groups. However, when learners were asked instead to select from a list which subjects they were likely to choose at GCSE, there was a statistically significant difference in the results: girls from schools in the treatment group were more likely to choose GCSE Computer Science as one of their options than girls in the control group. This finding suggests that it would be beneficial to gender balance in Computing if educators who design Computing curricula consider multiple endpoints for learners and include personally meaningful contexts to create learning experiences that are relevant to diverse groups of learners.
This is the penultimate report to be published about the studies that are part of the Gender Balance in Computing programme. If you would like to stay up-to-date with the programme, you can sign up to our newsletter. Our final report is about a study that explored the role that options booklets and evenings play in students’ subject choice.
The post Using relevant contexts to engage girls in the Computing classroom: Study results appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
We are excited to announce our next free online seminars, running monthly from January 2023 and focusing on new research about primary school (K–5) teaching and learning of computing.
Our seminars, having covered various topics in computing education over the last three years, will now offer you a close look at current questions and research in primary computing education for 5- to 11-year-olds. Through this series we want to connect research and teaching practice, and further primary computing education across the globe.
Our upcoming seminars are for everyone interested in computing education, not just for primary school teachers — you are all cordially invited to join us. Previous seminars have been attended by a valuable mix of teachers, volunteers, tech industry professionals, and researchers, all keen to explore how computing education research can be put into practice.
Whether you teach in a classroom, or support learners in a coding club, you will find out how our youngest learners develop their computing knowledge. You’ll also explore with us what this means for your learning context in practical terms.
Each seminar starts with a presenter explaining, in easy-to-understand terms, some recent research they have done. The presentation is followed by a discussion in smaller groups. We then regroup for a Q&A session with the presenter.
Attendees of our previous seminars have said:
“The seminar will be useful in my practice when our coding club starts.”
“I love this initiative, your choice of speakers has been fantastic. You are creating a very valuable CPD resource for Computer Science teachers and educators all over the world. Thank you. 🙏”
“Just wanted to say a huge thank you for organising this. It was brilliant to hear the presentation but also the input from other educators in the breakout room. I currently teach in a department of one, which can be quite lonely, so to join other educators was brilliant and a real encouragement.”
Computer science has been taught in universities for many years, and only more recently has the subject been introduced in schools. That means there isn’t a lot of research about computing education for school-aged learners yet, and even less research about how young children of primary school age learn about computing.
That’s why we are excited to invite you to learn with us as we hear from international primary computing research teams who share their knowledge in our online seminars:
All our seminars start at 17:00 UK time (18:00 CET / 12:00 noon ET / 9:00 PT) and take place in an online format. Sign up now to receive a calendar invitation and the link to join on the day of each seminar.
We look forward to seeing you soon, and to discussing with you how we can apply research results to better support all our learners.
The post Spotlight on primary computing education in our 2023 seminar series appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
We are so excited to share another story from the community! Our series of community stories takes you across the world to hear from young people and educators who are engaging with creating digital technologies in their own personal ways.
In this story we introduce you to Selin, a digital maker from Istanbul, Turkey, who is passionate about robotics and AI. Watch the video to hear how Selin’s childhood pet inspired her to build tech projects that aim to help others live well.
Selin (16) started her digital making journey because she wanted to solve a problem: after her family’s beloved dog Korsan passed away, she wanted to bring him back to life. Selin thought a robotic dog could be the answer, and so she started to design her project on paper. When she found out that learning to code would mean she could actually make a robotic dog, Selin began to teach herself about coding and digital making.
Thanks to her local CoderDojo, which is part of the worldwide CoderDojo network of free, community-based, volunteer-led programming clubs where young people explore digital technology, Selin’s interest in creating tech projects grew and grew. Selin has since built seven robots, and her enthusiasm for building things with digital technology shows no sign of stopping.
One of Selin’s big motivations to explore digital making was having an event to work towards. At her Dojo, Selin found out about Coolest Projects, the global technology showcase for young people. She then set herself the task of making a robot to present at the Coolest Projects event in 2018.
When thinking about ideas for what to make for Coolest Projects, Selin remembered how it felt to lose her dog. She wondered what it must be like when a blind person’s guide dog passes away, as that person loses their friend as well as their support. So Selin decided to make a robotic guide dog called IC4U. She contacted several guide dog organisations to find out how guide dogs are trained and what they need to be able to do so she could replicate their behaviour in her robot. The robot is voice-controlled so that people with impaired sight can interact with it easily.
Selin and her parents travelled to Coolest Projects International in Dublin, thanks to support from the CoderDojo Foundation. Accompanying them was Selin’s project IC4U, which became a judges’ favourite in the Hardware category. Selin enjoyed participating in Coolest Projects so much that she started designing her project for next year’s event straight away:
“When I returned back I immediately started working for next year’s Coolest Projects.”
Selin
Many of Selin’s tech projects share a theme: to help make the world a better place. For example, another robot made by Selin is the BB4All — a school assistant robot to tackle bullying. And last year, while she attended the Stanford AI4ALL summer camp, Selin worked with a group of young people to design a tech project to increase the speed and accuracy of lung cancer diagnoses.
Through her digital making projects, Selin wants to show how people can use robotics and AI technology to support people and their well-being. In 2021, Selin’s commitment to making these projects was recognised when she was awarded the Aspiring Teen Award by Women in Tech.
Listening to Selin, it is inspiring to hear how a person can use technology to express themselves as well as create projects that have the potential to do so much good. Selin acknowledges that sometimes the first steps can be the hardest, especially for girls interested in tech: “I know it’s hard to start at first, but interests are gender-free.”
“Be curious and courageous, and never let setbacks stop you so you can actually accomplish your dream.”
Selin
We have loved seeing all the wonderful projects that Selin has made in the years since she first designed a robot dog on paper. And it’s especially cool to see that Selin has also continued to work on her robot IC4U, the original project that led her to coding, Coolest Projects, and more. Selin’s robot has developed with its maker, and we can’t wait to see what they both go on to do next.
Help us celebrate Selin and inspire other young people to discover coding and digital making as a passion, by sharing her story on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
The post Celebrating the community: Selin appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we engage young people in learning about computing and creating with digital technologies. We do this not only by developing curricula for formal education and introducing tens of thousands of children around the world to coding at home, but also through supporting non-formal learning activities such as Code Club and CoderDojo.
To find out what works in non-formal computing learning, we’ve conducted two research projects recently: a systematic literature review, and a set of two interventions that were applied and evaluated as part of our Gender Balance in Computing programme. In this blog, we outline these two research projects.
When you think of young people learning computing, do you think of schools, classrooms, and curricula? You’d be right that lots of computing education for young people takes place in classrooms as part of national curricula. However, a lot of learning can take place outside of formal schooling. When we talk about non-formal computing education, we mean structured or semi-structured learning environments such as clubs or community groups, often set up by volunteers. These may take place in a school, library, or community venue; but we’ve also heard of some of our communities running non-formal learning activities on buses, in fire stations, or at football grounds — there really is no limit to where learning can happen.
It’s harder to assess the impact and effectiveness of non-formal computing activities than formal computing education: we have to think outside of the traditional measures such as grades and formal exams or assessments. Instead, we estimate outcomes according to measures such as level of participant engagement, attendance, attrition rates, and changes in participants’ attitudes towards computing. We have previously also piloted non-formal assessments such as quizzes and found that these were well-received by adult facilitators and children alike.
Earlier this year, we conducted a systematic literature review into computing education for K–12 learners in non-formal settings. We identified 88 relevant research studies, which we read, compared, and synthesised to provide an overview of what is already known about the effectiveness of non-formal computing activities and to identify opportunities for further research.
Our analysis looked for common themes within existing studies and suggested some benefits that non-formal learning offers, including:
We presented this research at an international computing education conference called ICER 2022, and you can read about it in our open-access paper in the ICER conference proceedings.
One particularly interesting characteristic of non-formal learning is that it tends to attract a broader range of learners than formal computing lessons. For example, a 2019 survey found that about 40% of the young people who attend Code Clubs were female. This is a high percentage compared with the proportion of girls among the learners choosing Computer Science GCSE in England, which is currently around 20%. We believe this points to an opportunity to capitalise on girls’ interest in learning activities outside of the classroom, and we hope to use non-formal activities to encourage more girls to take an interest in formal computer science education.
As part of our Gender Balance in Computing research programme in England, we worked with Apps for Good and the Behavioual Insights Team (BIT) to run two interventions in school-based non-formal settings, for which we adapted non-formal resources and used behavioural science concepts to strengthen the links the resources make between non-formal learning and studying computing more formally. One intervention ran in secondary schools for learners aged 13–14 years old, who used an adapted Apps for Good course, and the other ran in primary school for learners aged 8–11 year olds, who took part in Code Clubs using adapted versions of our projects.
The interventions were evaluated independently by a separate team from BIT, based on data from surveys completed by learners before and after the interventions, and interviews with teachers and learners. This data was analysed by the independent team to explore the impact the interventions had on learners’ attitudes towards computing and intention to study the subject in the future.
Our literature review concluded that future research in this area would benefit from experimenting with a variety of approaches to designing, and measuring the impact of, computing activities in a non-formal setting. For example, this could include comparing the short-term and long-term impact of specific interventions, aiming to cater for different types of participants, and offering different types of learning experiences.
In these two Gender Balance in Computing interventions, there was limited statistical evidence of an improvement in participants’ attitude towards computing or in their stated intention to study computer programming in the future. The independent evaluators recommended that the learning content that was created for the interventions could be adapted further to make the link between non-formal and formal learning even more salient. On the other hand, as is often the case with research, some interesting themes — ones that we weren’t looking for — emerged from the data, including:
In both projects, the findings suggest that it is beneficial for learners to participate in non-formal learning activities that link to real-world situations, and that this could be particularly beneficial for girls to help them see computing as a subject that is relevant to their own interests and goals. Another common theme in both projects is that non-formal learning activities play an important role in showing what a “computer person” looks like and who belongs in computing. This suggests there’s a need for a diverse range of volunteers to run non-formal computing activities, and that we should make sure that non-formal learning resources include representations of a diverse range of learners.
Undertaking these research projects has provided evidence that the work the Foundation does is on the right track and suggested opportunities to use these themes in our future non-formal work and resources.
More information about research projects at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and our newly launched Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre can be found on our research pages and on the Research Centre’s website.
The post Non-formal learning activities: What do we know and how do we apply it to computing? appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
In the penultimate seminar in our series on cross-disciplinary computing, we were delighted to host Conrad Wolfram (European co-founder/CEO of Wolfram Research).
Conrad has been an influential figure in the areas of AI, data science, and computation for over 30 years. The company he co-founded, Wolfram Research, develops computational technologies including the Wolfram programming language, which is used by the Mathematica and WolframAlpha programs. In the seminar, Conrad spoke about his work on developing a mathematics curriculum “for the AI age”.
In his talk, Conrad began by talking about the ubiquity of computation. He explained how computation (i.e. an operation that follows conditions to give a defined output) has transformed our everyday lives and led to the development of entire new sub-disciplines, such as computational medicine, computational marketing, and even computational agriculture. He then used the WolframAlpha tool to give several practical examples of applying high-level computation to problem-solving in different areas.
Conrad then turned his attention to the main question of his talk: if computation has also changed real-world mathematics, how should school-based mathematics teaching respond? He suggested that, as computation has impacted all aspects of our daily lives, school subjects should be reformed to better prepare students for the careers of the future.
His biggest criticism was the use of hand calculation methods in mathematics teaching. He proposed that a mathematics curriculum that “assumes computers exist” and uses computers (rather than humans) to compute answers would better support students to develop a deep understanding of mathematical concepts and principles. In other words, if students spent less time doing hand-calculation methods, they could devote more time to more complex problems.
One interesting aspect of Conrad’s talk was how he modelled the process of solving problems using computation. In all of the example problems, he outlined that computational problem-solving follows the same four-step process:
Depending on the problem, the process can be repeated multiple times until the desired solution is reached. Rather than being proposed as a static list of outcomes, the process was presented by Conrad as an iterative cycle than resembles an “ascending helix”:
In the later stages of his talk, Conrad talked about the development of a new computational curriculum to better define what a modern mathematics curriculum might look like. The platform that hosts the curriculum, named Computer-Based Math (or CBM), outlines the need to integrate computational thinking into mathematics in schools. For instance, one of the modules, How Fast Could I Cycle Stage 7 Of The An Post Rás?, asks students to develop a computational solution to a real-world problem. Following the four-step problem-solving process, students apply mathematical models, computational tools, and real-world data to generate a valid solution:
Some future challenges he remarked on included how a computer-based mathematics curriculum could be integrated with existing curricula or qualifications, at what ages computational mathematics should be taught, and what assessment, training, and hardware would be needed to support teachers to deliver such a curriculum.
Conrad concluded the talk by arguing that the current need for computational literacy is similar to the need for mass literacy and pondering whether the UK could lead the push towards a new computational curriculum suitable for learners who grow up with AI technologies. This point provided food for thought during our discussion section, especially for teachers interested in embedding computation into their lessons, and for researchers thinking about the impact of AI in different fields. We’re grateful to Conrad for speaking about his work and mission — long may it continue!
You can catch up on Conrad’s talk with his slides and the talk’s recording:
Conrad’s book, The Math(s) Fix: An Education Blueprint for the AI Age, gives more details on how he thinks data science, AI, and computation could be embedded into the modern maths curriculum.
You can also explore Wolfram Research’s Computer-Based Maths curriculum, which offers learning materials to help teachers embed computation in their maths lessons.
Finally, try out Wolfram’s tools to solve everyday problems using computation. For example, you might ask WolframAlpha data-rich questions, which the tool converts from text input into a computable problem using natural language processing. (Two of my favourite example questions are: “How old was Leonardo when the Mona Lisa was painted?” and “What was the weather like when I was born?”)
In the final seminar of our series on cross-curricular computing, we welcome Dr Tracy Gardner and Rebecca Franks (Raspberry Pi Foundation) to present their ongoing work on computing education in non-formal settings. Sign up now to join us for this session on Tues 8 November:
We will shortly be announcing the theme of a brand-new series of research seminars starting in January 2023. The seminars will take place online on the first Tuesday of the month at 17:00–18:30 UK time.
The post Building a maths curriculum for a world shaped by computing appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
We’re sharing the fourth evaluation report on projects in our Gender Balance in Computing research programme today. This is a programme we’ve been running, with partner organisations, as part of the National Centre for Computing Education, funded by the Department for Education in England. The programme’s overall goal is to identify ways to encourage more young women to study Computer Science.
Like the previous reports on our Storytelling, Pair Programming, and Peer Instruction projects, this new report was compiled by independent evaluators from the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT). It concerns a study conducted with learners aged 9 to 10 and examining two approaches aimed at improving girls’ sense of belonging in computing.
A growing body of research suggests that girls’ interest and motivation is linked to the sense of belonging that they feel when experiencing and studying STEM subjects. When girls see themselves represented in computing by identifying role models, they are more likely to value the subject in their studies and future careers. Parents and wider family members also play an important role in amplifying the message that girls belong in computing through the way that they talk about the subject.
The Belonging study was structured as two distinct but related interventions designed to improve girls’ sense of belonging, each following a different approach. WISE and a team at BIT (separate to the team evaluating the study) were responsible for the design, delivery, and implementation of the two interventions, while we provided overall programme management and recruited schools.
This study was conducted from September 2021 to February 2022 as a randomised controlled trial (RCT) where participating schools were randomly divided into three groups: two treatment groups which each delivered one of the two interventions to their Year 5 learners, and one control group, which taught Computing to their Year 5 learners in their usual way throughout the duration of the study.
The intervention designed by WISE was titled ‘My Skills My Life’ and was aimed at girls’ self-identification. The design included ten lessons that highlighted the importance of computing and STEM and how these fields impact our lives. The lessons also introduced pupils to female role models working in professions relating closely to computing.
A core component was a lesson midway through the intervention, where schools in the treatment group held a ‘real-life role model’ session with female role models from the computing industry. In this session, volunteer role models shared their day-to-day work experiences and discussed some fundamental concepts and perceptions related to their role. To do so, the role models first received support and training from the schools based on material provided by WISE. WISE also provided additional training and guidance on resource usage and how to talk about computing careers to make them more understandable and relatable to children.
In addition to the lesson content and training, WISE created a role model booklet with information on 72 women currently working in computing and associated industries. These women had volunteered to be included in the booklet and to also speak to pupils potentially interested in computing. The main purpose of presenting these role-models was to let the primary pupils meet women who are happy and successful in computing careers.
“I loved learning about [role model name]’s job during the day. It was so cool.”
– Primary school pupil (report, p. 50)
The other intervention in the trial, designed by BIT, was called ‘Code Stars’. This intervention ran over 12 weeks. Schools involved in it first delivered a stand-alone, one-off lesson on artificial intelligence (AI).
After the lesson, the pupils completed a homework task, engaging with their parents or carers. This was followed by a set of regular conversation prompts to encourage parents to have discussions with their children about computing in general and the AI lesson in particular. The original plan was for BIT to implement these conversation prompts, but due to COVID-19-related challenges, teachers had to take the responsibility of sending the prompts. At the end of the intervention, teachers conducted a follow-up lesson.
“Some parents did not want to support their children due to their own lack of confidence. Others did not see it as important as doing the weekly Maths and English homework.”
– Teacher participating in the Code Stars intervention (report, p. 55)
These two separate but related approaches aimed at increasing girls’ sense of membership in the computing community and to improve their and their parents’ engagement. The overall impact was evaluated using a mixed method approach; this included case studies, online teacher surveys, parent interviews, pupil surveys, lesson observations, and pupil focus groups.
The impact evaluation did not find conclusive evidence of either intervention having an impact on female pupils’ attitudes towards computing or their intention to study computing in the future. However, the stated intention of girls to study computing was 5.6 percentage points higher in the Code Stars intervention group than in the control group. This difference was statistically significant in some, although not all, of the analysis run; this means we cannot rule out that this result was due to chance, rather than due to the intervention.
In addition, qualitative data collected from teachers suggested that the My Skills My Life intervention delivery was very well received and needed only minor adjustments, although this did not translate into evidence of impact on the measured pupil outcomes. Teachers also appreciated the level of detail in the My Skills My Life lesson plans, and the Code Stars intervention was described as fun and engaging.
The independent evaluators of this research study have recommended refinements to each of the interventions to improve their delivery and potential impact, along with suggested evaluation strategies for any future replications of the interventions.
We are very grateful to all the schools, pupils, and teachers who took part in this project. If you would like to stay up-to-date with the Gender Balance in Computing programme, you can sign up to our newsletter. We will also share reports on the other projects within the programme that have explored:
The post Girls’ sense of belonging in the Computing classroom: Study results appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
For our seminar series on cross-disciplinary computing, it was a delight to host Genevieve Smith-Nunes this September. Her research work involving ballet and augmented reality was a perfect fit for our theme.
Genevieve has a background in classical ballet and was also a computing teacher for several years before starting Ready Salted Code, an educational initiative around data-driven dance. She is now coming to the end of her doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge, in which she focuses on raising awareness of data ethics using ballet and brainwave data as narrative tools, working with student Computing teachers.
You may be surprised that there are links between dance, particularly ballet, and computing. Genevieve explained that classical ballet has a strict repetitive routine, using rule-based choreography and algorithms. Her work on data-driven dance had started at the time of the announcement of the new Computing curriculum in England, when she realised the lack of gender balance in her computing classroom. As an expert in both ballet and computing, she was driven by a desire to share the more creative elements of computing with her learners.
Genevieve has been working with a technologist and a choreographer for several years to develop ballets that generate biometric data and include visualisation of such data — hence her term ‘data-driven dance’. This has led to her developing a second focus in her PhD work on how Computing students can discuss questions of ethics based on the kind of biometric and brainwave data that Genevieve is collecting in her research. Students need to learn about the ethical issues surrounding data as part of their Computing studies, and Genevieve has been working with student teachers to explore ways in which her research can be used to give examples of data ethics issues in the Computing curriculum.
Throughout her talk, Genevieve described several examples of dances she had created. One example was [arra]stre, a project that involved a live performance of a dance, plus a series of workshops breaking down the computer science theory behind the performance, including data visualisation, wearable technology, and images triggered by the dancers’ data.
Much of Genevieve’s seminar was focused on the technologies used to capture movement data from the dancers and the challenges this involves. For example, some existing biometric tools don’t capture foot movement — which is crucial in dance — and also can’t capture movements when dancers are in the air. For some of Genevieve’s projects, dancers also wear headsets that allow collection of brainwave data.
Due to interruptions to her research design caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, much of Genevieve’s PhD research took place online via video calls. New tools had to be created to capture dance performances within a digital online setting. Her research uses webcams and mobile phones to record the biometric data of dancers at 60 frames per second. A number of processes are then followed to create a digital representation of the dance: isolating the dancer in the raw video; tracking the skeleton data; using post pose estimation machine learning algorithms; and using additional software to map the joints to the correct place and rotation.
It’s clear from Genevieve’s research that she is collecting a lot of data from her research participants, particularly the dancers. The projects include collecting both biometric data and brainwave data. Ethical issues tied to brainwave data are part of the field of neuroethics, which comprises the ethical questions raised by our increasing understanding of the biology of the human brain.
Teaching learners to be mindful about how to work with personal data is at the core of the work that Genevieve is doing now. She mentioned that there are a number of ethics frameworks that can be used in this area, and highlighted the UK government’s Data Ethics Framework as being particularly straightforward with its three guiding principles of transparency, accountability, and fairness. Frameworks such as this can help to guide a classroom discussion around the security of the data, and whether the data can be used in discriminatory ways.
Data ethics provides lots of material for discussion in Computing classrooms. To exemplify this, Genevieve recorded her own brainwaves during dance, research, and rest activities, and then shared the data during workshops with student computing teachers. In our seminar Genevieve showed two visualisations of her own brainwave data (see the images above) and discussed how the student computing teachers in her workshops had felt that one was more “personal” than the other. The same brainwave data can be presented as a spreadsheet, or a moving graph, or an image. Student computing teachers felt that the graph data (shown above) felt more medical, and more like permanent personal data than the visualisation (shown above), but that the actual raw spreadsheet data felt the most personal and intrusive.
Watch the recording of Genevieve’s seminar to see her full talk:
You can also access her slides and the links she shared in her talk.
There are a variety of online tools you can use to explore augmented reality: for example try out Posenet with the camera of your device.
Genevieve’s seminar used the title ME++, which refers to the data self and the human self: both are important and of equal value. Genevieve’s use of this term is inspired by William J. Mitchell’s book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Within his framing, the I in the digital world is more than the I of the physical world and highlights the posthuman boundary-blurring of the human and non-human.
Genevieve’s work is also inspired by Luciani Floridi’s philosophical work, and his book Ethics of Information might be something you want to investigate further. You can also read ME++ Data Ethics of Biometrics Through Ballet and AR, a paper by Genevieve about her doctoral work
In our final two seminars for this year we are exploring further aspects of cross-disciplinary computing. Just this week, Conrad Wolfram of Wolfram Technologies joined us to present his ideas on maths and a core computational curriculum. We will share a summary and recording of his talk soon.
On 8 November, Tracy Gardner and Rebecca Franks from the Raspberry Pi Foundation team will close out this series by presenting work we have been doing on computing education in non-formal settings. Sign up now to join us for this session:
We will shortly be announcing the theme of a brand-new series of seminars starting in January 2023.
The post Data ethics for computing education through ballet and biometrics appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
In 2016, Code Club Australia launched the Moonhack online coding event and broke the world record for the most children coding in one day. Then in 2017 they broke the record again. By now, more than 150,000 young learners from 70 countries have participated in Moonhack.
Moonhack is an online coding challenge for young learners and celebrates humans’ technological achievements. The 2022 event takes place from 10 to 23 October to coincide with World Space Week, and it features six brand-new projects that show how satellites can help us live more sustainably. We caught up with Kaye North, Community and Engagement Manager at Code Club Australia, to find out more.
Kaye developed this year’s projects across Scratch, micro:bit, and Python to cater for learners with all levels of coding experience. One project was designed in collaboration with astrophysicist Dr Brad Tucker from the Australian National University. Another project highlights that objects in the sky have been meaningful for humans since way before the advent of modern satellites. Kaye developed this project together with a community in the Torres Strait.
“The Torres Strait is a unique part of Australia off the tip of Queensland,” Kaye told us. “It’s this amazing group of islands. As a teacher I taught there for three years and learned a lot about the community’s culture.” When a colleague suggested a project about Tagai — a constellation central to Torres Strait Islander culture — Kaye jumped at the chance to work with the island community again.
Kaye initially intended to work with a Torres Strait elder, “but that really snowballed. I had two days at a Tagai school, where the cultural teacher shared his story about the Tagai constellation. I worked with a Year 6 class, coding and putting ideas together, creating this one amazing project. And as we were pulling it together, one of the girls said ‘We need to put our language into it, we should be able to speak in it.’ And that’s where the idea of having the kids’ voices in the project came from.”
Moonhack 2021 had over 25,000 participants, and Kaye wants to share the Tagai project with as many people in 2022. When we asked her what else she hopes young people take away from Moonhack this year, she said:
“I hope that people really get the connection to satellites in space and how these are going to influence us fulfilling the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. I really hope that comes through. Big picture though? That the kids have fun.”
Moonhack 2022 runs from 10 to 23 October and is free and open to any young coder, whether they are part of a Code Club or not. The projects are already available in English, French, Dutch, and Greek. Arabic and Latin American Spanish versions are in preparation.
To take part with your young people, register on the Moonhack website.
Code Club Australia is powered by Telstra Foundation as part of a strategic partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The post Take part in Moonhack 2022: Community, culture, coding appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
We are looking for primary schools in England to get involved in our new research study investigating how to adapt Computing resources to make them culturally relevant for pupils. In a project in 2021, we created guidelines that included ideas about how teachers can modify Computing lessons so they are culturally relevant for their learners. In this new project, we will work closely with primary teachers to explore this adaptation process.
This project will help increase the education community’s understanding of ways to widen participation in Computing. The need to do this is demonstrated (as only one example among many) by the fact that in England’s 2017 GCSE Computer Science cohort, Black students were the most underrepresented group. We will investigate how resources adapted to be culturally relevant might influence students’ ideas about computing and contribute to their sense of identity as a “computer person”.
This study is funded by the Cognizant Foundation and we are grateful for their generous support. Since 2018, the Cognizant Foundation has worked to ensure that all individuals have equitable opportunities to thrive in the jobs driving the future. Their work aligns with our mission to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies.
This project about culturally adapted resources will take place between October 2022 and July 2023. It draws from ideas on how to bridge the gap between academic research and classroom teaching, and we are looking for 12 primary teachers to work closely with our researchers and content writers in three phases using a tested co-creation model.
By taking part, you will gain an excellent understanding of culturally relevant pedagogy and develop your knowledge and skills in delivering culturally responsive Computing lessons. We will value your expertise and your insights into what works in your classroom, and we will listen to your ideas.
We will kick off the project with a day-long workshop on 2 November at our head office in Cambridge, which will bring all the participating teachers together. (Funding is available for participating schools to cover supply costs and teachers’ travel costs.) In the workshop, we will first explore what culturally relevant and responsive computing means. Then we will work together to look at a half-term unit of work of Computing lessons and identify how it could be adapted. After the workshop day, we will produce an adapted version of the unit of work based on the teachers’ input and ideas.
In the Spring Term, teachers will deliver the adapted unit of work to their class in the second half of the term. Through a survey before and after the set of lessons, students will be asked about their views of computing. Throughout this time, the research team will be available for online support. We may also visit your school to carry out an observation of one of the lessons.
During this phase, the research team will ask participating teachers about their experiences, and about whether and how they further adapted the lessons. Teachers will likely spend 2 to 3 hours in either April or May sharing their insights and recommendations. After this phase, we will analyse the findings from the study and share the results both with the participating teachers and the wider computing education community.
For this study, we are looking for primary teachers who teach Computing to Year 4 or Year 5 pupils in a school in England.
We will also give preference to schools with culturally diverse catchment areas.
If you are an interested teacher, please apply to take part in this project by the closing date of Monday, 3 October. If you have any questions, email us at research@raspberrypi.org.
The post Take part in our research study to develop culturally relevant Computing resources for primary schools appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Many technology items are disposed of each year, either because they are broken, are no longer needed, or have been upgraded. Researchers from Germany have identified this as an opportunity to develop a scheme of work for Computing, while at the same time highlighting the importance of sustainability in hardware and software use. They hypothesised that by repairing defective devices, students would come to understand better how these devices work, and therefore meet some of the goals of their curriculum.
The research team visited three schools in Germany to deliver Computing lessons based around the concept of a repair café, where defective items are repaired or restored rather than thrown away. This idea was translated into a series of lessons about using and repairing smartphones. Learners first of all explored the materials used in smartphones and reflected on their personal use of these devices. They then spent time moving around three repair workstations, examining broken smartphones and looking at how they could be repaired or repurposed. Finally, learners reflected on their own ecological footprint and what they had learnt about digital hardware and software.
In the classroom, repair workstations were set up for three different categories of activity: fixing cable breaks, fixing display breaks, and tinkering to upcycle devices. Each workstation had a mentor to support learners in investigating faults themselves by using the question prompt, “Why isn’t this feature or device working?” At the display breaks and cable breaks workstations, a mentor was on hand to provide guidance with further questions about the hardware and software used to make the smartphone work. On the other hand, the tinkering workstation offered a more open-ended approach, asking learners to think about how a smartphone could be upcycled to be used for a different purpose, such as a bicycle computer. It was interesting to note that students visited each of the three workstations equally.
The feedback from the participants showed there had been a positive impact in prompting learners to think about the sustainability of their smartphone use. Working with items that were already broken also gave them confidence to explore how to repair the technology. This is a different type of experience from other Computing lessons, in which devices such as laptops or tablets are provided and are expected to be carefully looked after. The researchers also asked learners to complete a questionnaire two weeks after the lessons, and this showed that 10 of the 67 participants had gone on to repair another smartphone after taking part in the lessons.
The project drew on a theory called duality reconstruction that has been developed by a researcher called Carsten Schulte. This theory argues that in computing education, it is equally important to teach learners about the function of a digital device as about the structure. For example, in the repair café lessons, learners discovered more about the role that smartphones play in society, as well as experimenting with broken smartphones to find out how they work. This brought a socio-technical perspective to the lessons that helped make the interaction between the technology and society more visible.
Using this approach in the Computing classroom may seem counter-intuitive when compared to the approach of splitting the curriculum into topics and teaching each topic sequentially. However, the findings from this project suggest that learners understand better how smartphones work when they also think about how they are manufactured and used. Including societal implications of computing can provide learners with useful contexts about how computing is used in real-world problem-solving, and can also help to increase learners’ motivation for studying the subject.
The final aspect of this research project looked at collaborative problem-solving. The lessons were structured to include time for group work and group discussion, to acknowledge and leverage the range of experiences among learners. At the workstations, learners formed small groups to carry out repairs. The paper doesn’t mention whether these groups were self-selecting or assigned, but the researchers did carry out observations of group behaviours in order to evaluate whether the collaboration was effective. In the findings, the ideal group size for the repair workstation activity was either two or three learners working together. The researchers noticed that in groups of four or more learners, at least one learner would become disinterested and disengaged. Some groups were also observed taking part in work that wasn’t related to the task, and although no further details are given about the nature of this, it is possible that the groups became distracted.
The findings from this project suggest that learners understand better how smartphones work when they also think about how they are manufactured and used.
Further investigation into effective pedagogies to set group size expectations and maintain task focus would be helpful to make sure the lessons met their learning objectives. This research was conducted as a case study in a small number of schools, and the results indicate that this approach may be more widely helpful. Details about the study can be found in the researchers’ paper (in German).
If you’re thinking about setting up a repair café in your school to promote sustainable computing, either as a formal or informal learning activity, here are ideas on where to begin:
This article is from our free computing education magazine Hello World. Every issue is written by educators for educators and packed with resources, ideas, and insights to inspire your learners and your own classroom practice.
For more about computing education in the context of sustainability, climate change, and environmental impact, download issue 19 of Hello World, which focuses on these topics.
You can subscribe to Hello World for free to never miss a digital issue, and if you’re an educator in the UK, a print subscription will get you free print copies in the post.
PS If you’re interested in facilitating productive classroom discussions with your learners about ethical, legal, cultural, and environmental concerns surrounding computer science, take a look at our free online course ‘Impacts of Technology: How To Lead Classroom Discussions’.
The post Repair cafés in computing education | Hello World #19 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Today, we are publishing the third report of our findings from our Gender Balance in Computing research programme. This report shares the outcomes from the Peer Instruction project, which is the last in our set of three interventions that has explored teaching approaches to engage more girls in computing.
The premise of the teaching approach research is that the way Computing is taught may not always match the teaching approaches to which girls are most likely to respond positively [1]. As with the Storytelling project and the Pair Programming project, this project aimed to find new contexts and approaches to help increase the number of girls choosing to study and work in computing.
Peer instruction is a structured, collaborative teaching approach. It has been shown to be an effective pedagogy for novice programmers and those studying computer science at a university level because the interactive, cooperative activities help learners to perceive the topics as less stressful and less difficult [2].
Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and peer conversations about the question answers are at the core of the peer instruction approach. Through talking to each other about MCQs, pupils can deepen their understanding about why a particular concept or fact is correct, and correct any misconceptions.
In England, the Computing curriculum at Key Stage 3 (ages 11–14) introduces learners to some new concepts, such as data representation, and moves learners to text-based programming languages. Towards the end of this Key Stage, learners will make choices about the subjects that they go onto study for GCSEs. These choices are influenced by learners’ attitudes towards the subject, and so we decided to trial whether the peer instruction teaching approach might lead to more positive attitudes towards Computing among girls.
The initial pilot of this trial ran from January to March 2020 with 15 secondary schools. We then used teacher feedback to develop resources to use in a full randomised controlled trial which ran from October 2021 to February 2022 in more than 60 secondary schools in England. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we changed our original plan to run face-to-face training and instead developed an online course to train teachers in the peer instruction approach. After taking part in the training, the teachers delivered 12 weeks of Computing lessons in data representation and Python programming. The two six-week units of work covered computing concepts for Key Stage 3 learners such as:
The study was run as a randomised controlled trial where participating schools were randomly divided into two groups. Schools in the treatment group used the peer instruction resources, and schools in the control group taught their normal Computing lessons. The independent evaluators from the Behavioural Insights Team used pupil surveys to measure the impact of the resources and supported this with lesson observations and teacher interviews to better understand the themes emerging from the data.
“I think peer instruction lessons are actually better than the normal lessons because you can ask other people around you to help more.”
– Female pupil who took part in the peer instruction lessons (report, p. 45)
The outcome measures of the peer instruction approach evaluation were quantitative data obtained from Year 8 pupils (aged 12 to 13) via pre- and post-surveys about the pupils’ stated intent to select Computer Science as a GCSE subject, and attitudes towards Computing as captured by the Student Computer Science Attitude Survey (SCSAS). When compared with the control group, the treatment group did not show a statistically significant increase in stated intent or positive attitudes towards Computing. This is a really valuable finding to help us build our understanding of what works in computing education.
The evaluation report contains some useful suggestions on how peer instruction methods could be improved in the secondary classroom:
At the start of both the Pair Programming and Peer Instruction projects, pupils were asked the same set of questions about their attitudes towards Computing via the Student Computer Science Attitude Survey (SCSAS). The mean scores from the survey results suggest that there is a small gender gap in attitudes at primary school. Boys feel slightly more confident and interested in Computing than girls. By secondary school, this gap has widened, as shown in the graph below:
In both projects, pupils were also asked about their intentions to continue studying Computing. In the Pair Programming project, the participating pupils (in Year 4/6) were asked whether they wanted to study Computing in the future, whereas the Year 8 pupils taking part in the Peer Instruction project were asked whether they intended to choose Computer Science as a GCSE subject. We cannot compare these two sets of answers directly, but there is general indication that as girls progress through stages of education, they begin to decide that Computing is not a subject for them. The independent evaluators commented that “it is striking that the gap between genders widens to such an extent over this 2- to 4-year time period, and that the overall proportions of pupils intending to continue to study Computing decreases to such an extent” (p. 15 of the report).
“These findings show a clear difference in attitudes towards learning Computing between primary and secondary learners. It really makes the adage ‘Year 8 is too late’ very true, and it is important to think carefully about what happens between Year 6 and Year 8 to make sure that Computing is a subject which engages all learners.”
– Sue Sentance, Chief Learning Officer, Raspberry Pi Foundation
We are very grateful to all the schools, pupils, and teachers who took part in this project. If you would like to stay up-to-date with the Gender Balance in Computing programme, you can sign up to our newsletter. We will also share reports on the other projects within the programme that have explored:
[1] Goode, J., Estrella, R., & Margolis, J. (2008). Lost in Translation: Gender and High School Computer Science. In Cohoon, J, & Aspray, W. (Eds.) Women and Information Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7272.003.0005
[2] Herman, G. L., & Azad, S. (2020, February). A comparison of peer instruction and collaborative problem solving in a computer architecture course. In Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. pp. 461–467. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3328778.3366819
The post A peer instruction approach for engaging girls in the Computing classroom: Study results appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Since joining the Raspberry Pi Foundation as a Code Club Community Manager for Scotland earlier this year, I have seen first-hand the passion, dedication, and commitment of the Scottish community to support the digital, personal, and social skills of young people.
Code Club launched in schools in 2012 to give opportunities to children to share and develop their love of coding through free after-school clubs. Now we have clubs across the world connecting learners in having fun with digital technologies.
One of my first visits was to St. Mark’s Primary School in East Renfrewshire, where I met an amazing Code Club leader called Ashley Guy. Ashley only got involved in Code Club this year, but has already launched three clubs at her school!
I went to visit her Primary 2 and 3’s club, where the children were working on creating animations in Scratch to celebrate Code Club’s tenth birthday. It was a real joy to see the young children so engaged with our projects. The young coders worked both independently and together to create their own animations.
One of the girls I spoke to made a small error while coding her project, but she smiled and said, “I made a mistake, but that’s okay because that’s how we learn!” She showed just the kind of positive, problem-solving mindset that Code Club helps to cultivate.
Another school doing something incredible at their Code Club, led by Primary 7 teacher Fiona Lindsay, is Hillside School in Aberdeenshire. I love seeing the fun things they get up to, including celebrating Code Club’s 10th birthday in style with an impressive Code Club cake.
Fiona and her club are using the Code Club projects and resources to create their own exciting and challenging games. They’ve taken part in several of our online codealongs, and they also held an event at the school to showcase their great work — which even got the children’s parents coding!
Some of the young people who attend Code Club at Hillside School sent us videos about their experiences, why they come to Code Club, and what it means to them. Young coder Abisola describes Code Club in one word:
Young coder Crystal said, “We can experiment with what we know and make actual projects… At Code Club we learn about new blocks in Scratch and what blocks and patterns go together to make something.” Here is Crystal sharing her favourite part of Code Club:
Obuma also attends the Code Club at Hillside School. She shared what she gains from attending the sessions and why she thinks other young people should join a Code Club too:
“At Code Club we improve our teamwork skills, because there’s a lot of people in Code Club and most of the time you work together to create different things… Join [Code Club] 100%. It is so fun. It might not be something everyone would want to try, but if you did try it, then you would enjoy it.”
Obuma, young coder at Hillside School’s Code Club
One of the things I’ve enjoyed most as part of the Code Club team has been running an UK-wide online codealong to celebrate STEM Clubs Week. The theme was outer space, so our ‘Lost in space’ project in Scratch was the ideal fit.
During this practical coding session, classes across Scotland, England, and Wales had great fun coding the project together to animate rockets that move around space. We were thrilled by the feedback from teachers.
“The children really enjoyed the session. They are very proud of their animations and some children went on to extend their programs. All [the] children said they would love to do more codealongs!”
Teacher who took part in an online Code Club codealong
Thank you to everyone who got involved in the codealong. See you again at the next one.
To help you start your Code Club year with ease and fun, we will be launching new free resources for you and your club members. There’ll be a special pack filled with step-by-step instructions and engaging activities to kickstart your first session back, and a fun sticker chart to help young coders mark their progress.
We would love to see you at our practical and interactive online workshop ‘Ten reasons why coding is fun for everyone’ on Thursday 15 September at 16:00–17:00 BST, which will get you ready for National Coding Week (19–23 September). Come along to the workshop to get useful guidance and tips on how to engage everyone with coding.
We will also be holding lots of other exciting activities and sessions throughout the upcoming school term, including for World Space Week (4–10 October), the Moonhack coding challenge in October, and World Hello Day in November. So keep an eye on our Twitter @CodeClubUK for live updates.
Whether you’re interested in learning more about Code Club in Scotland, you have a specific question, or you just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you. You can contact me at scotland@codeclub.org, or @CodeClubSco on Twitter. I’ll also be attending the Scottish Education Expo on 21 and 22 September along with other Code Club team members, so come along and say hello.
With the new school term approaching, now is a great time to register and start a Code Club at your school. You can find out more on our website, codeclub.org, or contact us directly at support@codeclub.org
The post Say “aye” to Code Club in Scotland appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
In our current series of research seminars, we are exploring how computing can be connected to other subjects using cross-disciplinary approaches. In July 2022, our speakers were Professor Yasmin Kafai from the University of Pennsylvania and Elaine Griggs, an award-winning teacher from Pembroke High School, Massachusetts, and we heard about their use of e-textiles to engage learners and broaden participation in computing.
The spaces where young people learn about computing have sometimes been referred to as clubhouses to relate them to the places where sports or social clubs meet. A computing clubhouse can be a place where learners come together to take part in computing activities and gain a sense of community. However, as Yasmin pointed out, research has found that computing clubhouses have also often been dominated by electronics and robotics activities. This has led to clubhouses being perceived as exclusive spaces for only the young people who share those interests.
Yasmin’s work is motivated by the idea of building new clubhouses that include a wide range of computing interests, with a specific focus on spaces for e-textile activities, to show that diverse uses of computing are valued.
Yasmin’s research into learning through e-textiles has taken place in formal computing lessons in high schools in America, by developing and using a unit from the Exploring Computer Science curriculum called “Stitching the Loop”. In the seminar, we were fortunate to be joined by Elaine, a computer science and robotics teacher who has used the scheme of work in her classroom. Elaine’s learners have designed wearable electronic textile projects with microcontrollers, sensors, LEDs, and conductive thread. With these materials, learners have made items such as paper circuits, wristbands, and collaborative banners, as shown in the examples below.
The hands-on, project-based approach in the e-textile unit has many similarities with the principles underpinning the work we do at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. However, there were also two specific teaching approaches that were embedded in Elaine’s teaching in order to promote equitable learning in the computing classroom:
As teachers with a set of learning outcomes to deliver, we can often feel a certain pressure to structure lessons so that our learners spend the most time on activities that we feel will deliver those outcomes. I was very interested to hear how in these e-textile projects, there was a deliberate choice to foreground the aesthetics. When learners spent time designing their artefacts and could link it to their own interests, they had a sense of personal ownership over what they were making, which encouraged them to persevere and overcome any difficulties with sewing, code, or electronics.
My personal reflection was that creating a digital textiles project based on a set template could be considered the equivalent of teaching programming by copying code. Both approaches would increase the chances of a successful output, but wouldn’t necessarily increase learners’ understanding of computing concepts, nor encourage learners to perceive computing as a subject where everyone belongs. I was inspired by the insights shared at the seminar about how prioritising design time can lead to more diverse representations of making.
Elaine told us that learners were encouraged to create a digital portfolio which included photographs of the different stages of their project, examples of their code, and reflections on the problems that they had solved during the project. In the picture below, the learner has shared both the ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ versions of their code, along with an explanation of how they debugged the error.
Yasmin explained the equity-oriented theories underpinning the digital portfolio teaching approach. The learners’ reflections allowed deeper understanding of the computing and electronics concepts involved and helped to balance the personalised nature of their artefacts with the need to meet learning goals.
Yasmin also emphasised how important it was for learners to take part in a series of projects so that they encountered computing and electronics concepts more than once. In this way, reflective journalling can be seen as an equitable teaching approach because it helps to move learners on from their initial engagement into more complex projects. Thinking back to the clubhouse model, it is equally important for learners to be valued for their complex e-textile projects as it is for their complex robotics projects, and so portfolios of a series of e-textile projects show that a diverse range of learners can be successful in computing at the highest levels.
If you’re thinking about ways of introducing e-textile activities to your learners, there are some useful resources here:
We’re having a short break in the seminar series but will be back in September when we’ll be continuing to find out more about cross-disciplinary approaches to computing.
In our next seminar on Tuesday 6 September 2022 at 17:00–18:30 BST / 12:00–13:30 EST / 9:00–10:30 PST / 18:00–19:30 CEST, we’ll be hearing all about the links between computing and dance, with our speaker Genevieve Smith-Nunes (University of Cambridge). Genevieve will be speaking about data ethics for the computing classroom through biometrics, ballet, and augmented reality (AR) which promises to be a fascinating perspective on bringing computing to new audiences.
The post Using e-textiles to deliver equitable computing lessons and broaden participation appeared first on Raspberry Pi.