- Senior Research Scientist at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre
The Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre was established in July 2021 and is based in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. The Centre is a joint initiative between the University and the Raspberry Pi Foundation and offers an exciting opportunity to combine expertise from across both institutions to deliver a step-change in computing education. The Centre seeks to achieve long-term impact by conducting original research as well as working with its partners to turn new research results into practice, including by working closely with the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s educational programmes.
The aim of the Centre is to increase our understanding of teaching and learning computing, computer science, and associated subjects, with a particular focus on young people who are from backgrounds that are traditionally under-represented in the field of computing or who experience educational disadvantage.
More information about the Centre can be found at http://computingeducationresearch.org.
Personally, I'm very excited to be working in the Research Centre and I am looking forward to collaborating with teachers and other researchers during our studies.
Biography
In addition to my role as Senior Research Scientist at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre I am also completing a part-time PhD in Computing Education Research at Queen Mary University of London. Before this, I worked as a developer in the IT industry for twenty years and as as a primary school teacher for ten years. Since my time in industry and schools, I have been a computing education resource developer, teacher trainer, university lecturer, and researcher.
Having a computer science and education background led me to lead early work on computing education in K-5 (children from 5 to 12 years old) through the Barefoot Computing project. I have also worked on computing education for a wider range of learners including with cs4fn and Teaching Computing London. With funding from the DfE I lead CAS London, a large scale teacher community project and with Mayor of London funding I led the Queen Mary University of London TechPathways projects. As the CAS research chair, I have completed various projects, such as writing a University and Schools landscape document funded by the CPHC. I also run a computer science education research bookclub and a computer science education researcher community group. I often present at teacher-facing conferences on pedagogy and I am particularly interested in taking research to practice.
My Ph.D. research focuses on the use of design in K-5 programming projects, but I have also researched widely in K-12 computing education including on Semantic Waves, PRIMM, and broadening participation. I have published on computational thinking, design, primary pedagogy and a host of other topics in book chapters, journals and at conferences. At the Research Centre I am now leading on a wide range of projects including investigating how we might teach AI to younger learners, about teaching programming and about culturally responsible pedagogy.
Please get in touch with me if you are interested in finding out more about my research activities, as I love to talk about all things CS Ed research.
Research
My research interests are:
- Computing education for K-12 (school-aged children)
- AI education for young people
- Making computing inclusive and accessible to all
- Teacher professional development for computing
- The use of design in teaching programming (K-5)
- The use of Semantic Waves in teaching K-12 computing
- Teaching and learning of programming
- Sharing computing education pedagogy research with industry professionals
