Computer programming is now part of the school curriculum in England and many other countries. Although not necessarily the primary focus of the computing curriculum, programming can be the area teachers find most challenging to teach. There is much evidence emerging from research on how to teach programming, particularly from projects with undergraduate learners. That’s why I recently wrote a report summarising over 170 programming pedagogy papers: Teaching programming in schools: A review of approaches and strategies.
I hope this blog post about how I approached writing the report whets your appetite to read it, and encourages you to read more research summaries in general.
My approach to summarising research papers
Summarising findings from more than 170 research papers into 34 pages was not a task for the faint-hearted. I could not have embarked on this task without previous experience of writing similar, smaller reviews; working on a host of research projects; and writing reports about research for many different audiences.
I love reading about computer science education. It evokes very strong emotions, making me by turns happy, curious, impressed, alarmed, and even cross. When I summarise the papers of other researchers, I am very careful when deciding what to include and what to leave out, in order to do the researchers’ work justice while not overselling it or misleading readers. Sometimes research papers can be hard to fathom, with lots of jargon and statistics. In other papers, the conclusions drawn have many limitations: the project the paper describes hasn’t produced robust enough evidence to give a clear, generalisable message. Academic integrity and not misrepresenting the work of others is paramount. And naturally, there are many more than 170 papers about teaching programming, but I had to stop somewhere. All this makes summarising research a tricky task that one has to undertake with great care.
Another important aspect of summarising research is how to group papers. A long list saying “this paper said this”, “this paper said that” would not be easy to access and would not draw out overall themes. Often research studies span many topics. What might be a helpful grouping for one reader might not be interesting for another.
For this report, I grouped papers into three sections:
Classroom strategies: Here I included well-researched classroom strategies that teachers can use to teach programming in schools
Contexts and environments for learning programming: Here I outlined research related to opportunities for teaching programming, including different programming languages and the classroom context
Supporting learners: Here I summarised research that helps teachers support learners, particularly learners who have difficulties with programming
Why you as a teacher should read research summaries
Teachers, as very busy professionals, have little time to replan lessons, and programming lessons are challenging to start with. However, the potential long-term benefit may outweigh the short-term cost when it comes to reading research summaries: new insights from firmly grounded research can improve your teaching and enable more of your learners to be successful.
The process of translating research into practice is an area that I and the research team here are particularly interested in investigating. We are looking forward to working with teachers to explore this.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation regularly shares research summaries in the form of:
We’ve put together a new how-to guide for 3D printing and assembling your own Astro Pi unit replica, based on the upgraded units we sent to the International Space Station in December.
The new, upgraded Astro Pi units.
The Astro Pi case connects young people to the Astro Pi Challenge
It wasn’t long after the first Raspberry Pi computer was launched that people started creating the first cases for it. Over the years, they’ve designed really useful ones, along with some very stylish ones. Without a doubt, the most useful and stylish one has to be the Astro Pi flight case.
What’s inside the new units.
This case houses the Astro Pi units, the hardware young people use when they take part in the European Astro Pi Challenge. Designed by the amazing Jon Wells for the very first Astro Pi Challenge, which was part of Tim Peake’s Principia mission to the ISS in 2015, the case has become an iconic part of the Astro Pi journey for young people.
As Jon says: “The design of the original flight case, although functional, formed an emotional connection with the young people who took part in the programme and is an engaging and integral part of the experience of the Astro Pi.”
People love to 3D print Astro Pi cases
Although printing an Astro Pi case is absolutely not essential for participating in the European Astro Pi Challenge, many of the teams of young people who participate in Astro Pi Mission Space Lab, and create experiments to run on the Astro Pi units aboard the ISS, do print Astro Pi cases to house the hardware that we send them for testing their experiments.
An aluminium Astro Pi case, and a 3D printed case.
When we published the first how-to guide for 3D printing an Astro Pi case and making a working replica of the unit, it was immediately popular. We saw an exciting range of cases being produced. Some people (such as me) tried to make theirs look as similar as possible to the original aluminium Astro Pi flight unit, even using metallic spray paint to complete the effect. Others chose to go for a multicolour model, or even used glow-in-the-dark filament.
The guide also includes step-by-step instructions to completing the internal wiring so you can construct a working Astro Pi unit. We’re provided a custom version of the self-test software that is used on the official Astro Pis, so you can check that everything is operational.
If you’re new to 3D printing, you might like to try one of our BlocksCAD projects and practice printing a simpler design before you move on the the Astro Pi case.
Changes and improvements to the guide
We’ve made some changes to the original CAD designs to make printing the Mark II case parts and assembling a working Astro Pi replica unit as easy as possible. Unlike the STL files for the Mark I case, we’ve kept the upper and lower body components as single parts, rather than splitting each into two thinner halves. 3D printers have continued to improve since we wrote the first how-to guide. Most now have heated beds, which prevent warping, and we’ve successfully printed the Mark II parts on a range of affordable machines.
Printing an Astro Pi case.
The guide contains lots of hints and tips for getting the best results. As usual with 3D printing, be prepared to make some tweaks for the particular printer that you use.
In addition to the upper and lower case parts, there are also some extra components to print this time: the colour sensor window, the joystick cap, the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera housing, and the legs that protect the lenses and allow the Astro Pi units on the ISS to be safely placed up against the nadir window.
You can choose between four variants of the upper case part.
We’ve included files for four variants of the upper case part (see above). In order to keep costs down, the kits that we send to Astro Pi Mission Space Lab teams have a different PIR sensor to the ones of the proper Astro Pi units. So we’ve produced files for upper case parts that allow that sensor to be fitted. If you’re not taking part in the European Astro Pi Challenge, this also offers a cheaper alternative to creating an Astro Pi replica which still includes the motion detection capability:
We’ve also provided versions for the upper case part that have smaller holes for the push buttons. So, if you don’t fancy splashing out on the supremely pressable authentic buttons, you can use other colourful alternatives, which typically have a smaller diameter.
The guide includes files for printing the Astro Pi’s protective legs.
Do share photos of your 3D-printed Astro Pi cases with us by tweeting pictures of them to @astro_pi and @RaspberryPi_org.
One week left to help young people make space history with Astro Pi Mission Zero
We are super excited to host a livestream to introduce young coders to creating 3D worlds with Unity. Tune in at 18:30 GMT on Thursday 24 March 2022 on YouTube to find out all about our free online learning path for getting started with Unity.
If you know young coders who love gaming, digital art, or storytelling and need a new programming challenge, this is the event for them. So mark your calendars!
Our free Unity project path, in partnership with Unity Technologies
In January, we launched an all-new online learning path of Unity projects, in partnership with Unity. With this path, youth who enjoy writing code will learn how to start using the free Unity Real-Time Development Platform to build their own digital 3D games and worlds.
Professional developers are using Unity to create well-known games such as Mario Kart Tour and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX. We’ve partnered with Unity to offer any young person, anywhere, the opportunity to take their first steps in creating virtual worlds using real-time 3D. The five-part Unity path we offer is educational and shows young people that if they can imagine something, then they can create it digitally with Unity.
Who is the Unity livestream for? Why should young people join?
For young people, coding in Unity can be a fun experience of creating their own 3D worlds. And it also helps them learn skills that can be useful and desirable in the tech sector.
Unity is a step up for young people who have coded in a text-based language before and are interested in creating interactive 3D games and stories. In Unity, they’ll write code in the programming language C# — pronounced ‘cee sharp’. It’s a great opportunity to build on their existing coding and problem-solving skills.
Introducing young people to Unity means that they will begin to use the same tools as professional 3D developers. Maybe attending the Unity livestream is going to be your coders’ first step towards creating the next videogame sensation.
What will happen on the livestream?
The livestream will run for around 45 minutes. It will be the perfect introduction to Unity and our project path for you and your experienced coders.
The livestream will include:
A ‘question and answer’ section with Unity expert Thomas Winkley. Thomas is a Unity Certified Programmer and product evangelist. He’s passionate about helping others learn new skills and follow their interests. Thomas will be answering your questions about Unity and what you can do with it, as well as talking about some of the cool creations he’s made.
An introduction to the Unity project path with Liz from our team: You’ll get to ask your questions about our Unity project path, and you’ll learn what you can make with each project and see an example of a final project — like what you’ll create by completing the project path.
A live coding section with Rebecca and Mr C: Your young people get to join in coding their first characters and objects in the 3D environment of Unity.
By joining the livestream, your young people will:
Learn more about Unity and get inspired to start creating
See what our free online Unity learning path is all about and understand what they’ll get from completing it
Have the chance to see what it’s like to make their own creations with Unity, and code along if they want to
Do you need to do anything before the livestream?
The livestream takes place on Thursday24 March at 18:30 GMT on our YouTube channel. Everyone can tune in without signing up, wherever you are in the world. If you have a Google account, you can click the ‘Set a reminder’ button to make sure you and your keen coders don’t miss a thing.
Unity is free for anyone to use. If your young people want to code along during the livestream, they need to prepare by downloading and installing all the free software beforehand. Young people will need to:
Have downloaded and installed Unity Hub, from where they need to install Unity Editor and Visual Studio Community Edition. The first project in our Unity learning path links to instructions for how to do all this step by step.
We cannot wait for you to join us and our special guests on our Unity livestream!
Share Unity creations at Coolest Projects Global
Whatever your young people create with Unity — or other digital tech —, they can register to share it for the world to see in the online gallery of Coolest Projects Global. This is our free and completely online tech showcase, for young people up to age 18 all over the world.
Registering to showcase their tech creation means young people will get cool swag, feedback on what they’ve made, and a chance to win recognition from our special judges. And above all, they’ll become part of a worldwide community of young tech creators who celebrate and inspire each other.
At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we’ve been thinking about questions relating to artificial intelligence (AI) education and data science education for several months now, inviting experts to share their perspectives in a series of very well-attended seminars. At the same time, we’ve been running a programme of research trials to find out what interventions in school might successfully improve gender balance in computing. We’re learning a lot, and one primary lesson is that these topics are not discrete: there are relationships between them.
We can’t talk about AI education — or computer science education more generally — without considering the context in which we deliver it, and the societal issues surrounding computing, AI, and data. For this International Women’s Day, I’m writing about the intersection of AI and gender, particularly with respect to gender bias in machine learning.
The quest for gender equality
Gender inequality is everywhere, and researchers, activists, and initiatives, and governments themselves, have struggled since the 1960s to tackle it. As women and girls around the world continue to suffer from discrimination, the United Nations has pledged, in its Sustainable Development Goals, to achieve gender equality and to empower all women and girls.
While progress has been made, new developments in technology may be threatening to undo this. As Susan Leahy, a machine learning researcher from the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, puts it:
Artificial intelligence is increasingly influencing the opinions and behaviour of people in everyday life. However, the over-representation of men in the design of these technologies could quietly undo decades of advances in gender equality.
Susan Leavy, 2018 [1]
Gender-biased data
In her 2019 award-winning book Invisible Women: Exploring Data Bias in a World Designed for Men [2], Caroline Ceriado Perez discusses the effects of gender-biased data. She describes, for example, how the designs of cities, workplaces, smartphones, and even crash test dummies are all based on data gathered from men. She also discusses that medical research has historically been conducted by men, on male bodies.
Looking at this problem from a different angle, researcher Mayra Buvinic and her colleagues highlight that in most countries of the world, there are no sources of data that capture the differences between male and female participation in civil society organisations, or in local advisory or decision making bodies [3]. A lack of data about girls and women will surely impact decision making negatively.
Bias in machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a type of artificial intelligence technology that relies on vast datasets for training. ML is currently being use in various systems for automated decision making. Bias in datasets for training ML models can be caused in several ways. For example, datasets can be biased because they are incomplete or skewed (as is the case in datasets which lack data about women). Another example is that datasets can be biased because of the use of incorrect labels by people who annotate the data. Annotating data is necessary for supervised learning, where machine learning models are trained to categorise data into categories decided upon by people (e.g. pineapples and mangoes).
Max Gruber / Better Images of AI / Banana / Plant / Flask / CC-BY 4.0
In order for a machine learning model to categorise new data appropriately, it needs to be trained with data that is gathered from everyone, and is, in the case of supervised learning, annotated without bias. Failing to do this creates a biased ML model. Bias has been demonstrated in different types of AI systems that have been released as products. For example:
Facial recognition: AI researcher Joy Buolamwini discovered that existing AI facial recognition systems do not identify dark-skinned and female faces accurately. Her discovery, and her work to push for the first-ever piece of legislation in the USA to govern against bias in the algorithms that impact our lives, is narrated in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias.
Natural language processing: Imagine an AI system that is tasked with filling in the missing word in “Man is to king as woman is to X” comes up with “queen”. But what if the system completes “Man is to software developer as woman is to X” with “secretary” or some other word that reflects stereotypical views of gender and careers? AI models called word embeddings learn by identifying patterns in huge collections of texts. In addition to the structural patterns of the text language, word embeddings learn human biases expressed in the texts. You can read more about this issue in this Brookings Institute report.
Not noticing
There is much debate about the level of bias in systems using artificial intelligence, and some AI researchers worry that this will cause distrust in machine learning systems. Thus, some scientists are keen to emphasise the breadth of their training data across the genders. However, other researchers point out that despite all good intentions, gender disparities are so entrenched in society that we literally are not aware of all of them. White and male dominance in our society may be so unconsciously prevalent that we don’t notice all its effects.
As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu famously asserted in 1977: “What is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying: the tradition is silent, not least about itself as a tradition.” [4]. This view holds that people’s experiences are deeply, or completely, shaped by social conventions, even those conventions that are biased. That means we cannot be sure we have accounted for all disparities when collecting data.
What is being done in the AI sector to address bias?
Developers and researchers of AI systems have been trying to establish rules for how to avoid bias in AI models. An example rule set is given in an article in the Harvard Business Review, which describes the fact that speech recognition systems originally performed poorly for female speakers as opposed to male ones, because systems analysed and modelled speech for taller speakers with longer vocal cords and lower-pitched voices (typically men).
The article recommends four ways for people who work in machine learning to try to avoid gender bias:
Ensure diversity in the training data (in the example from the article, including as many female audio samples as male ones)
Ensure that a diverse group of people labels the training data
Measure the accuracy of a ML model separately for different demographic categories to check whether the model is biased against some demographic categories
Establish techniques to encourage ML models towards unbiased results
What can everybody else do?
The above points can help people in the AI industry, which is of course important — but what about the rest of us? It’s important to raise awareness of the issues around gender data bias and AI lest we find out too late that we are reintroducing gender inequalities we have fought so hard to remove. Awareness is a good start, and some other suggestions, drawn out from others’ work in this area are:
Improve the gender balance in the AI workforce
Having more women in AI and data science, particularly in both technical and leadership roles, will help to reduce gender bias. A 2020 report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) on gender parity found that women account for only 26% of data and AI positions in the workforce. The WEF suggests five ways in which the AI workforce gender balance could be addressed:
Support STEM education
Showcase female AI trailblazers
Mentor women for leadership roles
Create equal opportunities
Ensure a gender-equal reward system
Ensure the collection of and access to high-quality and up-to-date gender data
We need high-quality dataset on women and girls, with good coverage, including country coverage. Data needs to be comparable across countries in terms of concepts, definitions, and measures. Data should have both complexity and granularity, so it can be cross-tabulated and disaggregated, following the recommendations from the Data2x project on mapping gender data gaps.
Educate young people about AI
At the Raspberry Pi Foundation we believe that introducing some of the potential (positive and negative) impacts of AI systems to young people through their school education may help to build awareness and understanding at a young age. The jury is out on what exactly to teach in AI education, and how to teach it. But we think educating young people about new and future technologies can help them to see AI-related work opportunities as being open to all, and to develop critical and ethical thinking.
In our AI education seminars we heard a number of perspectives on this topic, and you can revisit the videos, presentation slides, and blog posts. We’ve also been curating a list of resources that can help to further AI education — although there is a long way to go until we understand this area fully.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
References
[1] Leavy, S. (2018). Gender bias in artificial intelligence: The need for diversity and gender theory in machine learning. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Gender Equality in Software Engineering, 14–16.
[2] Perez, C. C. (2019). Invisible Women: Exploring Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Random House.
[3] Buvinic M., Levine R. (2016). Closing the gender data gap. Significance 13(2):34–37
[4] Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice (No. 16). Cambridge University Press. (p.167)
We are really excited that our two upgraded Astro Pi units have arrived on the International Space Station. Each unit contains the latest model of the Raspberry Pi computer, plus a Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera and a host of sensors on a custom Sense HAT, all housed inside a special flight case designed to keep everything cool and protected. Here is the story of how the Astro Pi units were built:
The upgraded Astro Pi units have been designed and built in collaboration with ESA Education, the European Space Agency’s education programme. The Astro Pis’ purpose is for young people to use them in the European Astro Pi Challenge. The film highlights the units’ exciting new features, such as a machine learning accelerator and new camera, which can capture high-quality images of Earth from space using both visible light and near-infrared light.
The new Astro Pi unit, with its camera and machine learning accelerator.
There’s an extended team behind the new hardware and software, not just us working at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the European Space Agency.
“Thanks to our friends at ESA, and all the people who have shared their unique expertise and knowledge with us, […] we’ve managed to take two ordinary Raspberry Pi computers from the production line in Wales and see them end up on the International Space Station. It’s been a real privilege to get to work with such an amazing group of space professionals.”
– Richard Hayler, Senior Programme Manager and lead engineer of the Astro Pi units
The new Astro Pis are all ready to run young peoples’ computer programs as part of the European Astro Pi Challenge. The young people who successfully proposed experiments for the 2021/22 round of Astro Pi Mission Space Lab have just submitted their programs to us for testing. These programs will run the teams’ experiments on the new Astro Pis in May.
Your young people’s code in space
There is still time until 18 March to take part in the 2021/22 round of Astro Pi Mission Zero. Mission Zero is a beginners’ coding activity for all young people up to age 19 in ESA member and associate states. Mission Zero is free, can be completed online in an hour, and lets young people send their unique message to the astronauts on board the ISS.
To take part, participants follow our step-by-step guide to write a simple Python program. Their program will display their message to the astronautsvia the Astro Pi’s LED display (complete with ‘sunglasses’). Parents or educators support the participants by signing up for a mentor code to submit the young people’s programs.
All Mission Zero participants receive a certificate showing the exact time and location of the ISS when their program was run — their moment of space history to keep. And this year only, Mission Zero is extra special: participants can also help name the two new Astro Pi units!
You can watch ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer unpack and assemble the Astro Pi units in microgravity on board the ISS. It’s so exciting to work with the European Space Agency in order to send young people’s code into space. We hope you and your young people will take part in this year’s Astro Pi Challenge.
PS If you want to build your own replica of the Astro Pi units, we’ve got a treat for you soon. Next week, we’ll share a step-by-step how-to guide, including 3D printing files.
Ten years ago, Raspberry Pi started shipping its first computers in order to inspire young people to reimagine the role of technology in their lives. What started with a low-cost, high-performance computer has grown into a movement of millions of people of all ages and backgrounds.
Today, Raspberry Pi is the UK’s best-selling computer, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation is one of the world’s leading educational non-profits. Raspberry Pi computers make technology accessible to people and businesses all over the world. They are used everywhere from homes and schools to factories, offices, and shops.
Visit the history of Raspberry Pi
To help celebrate this 10-year milestone, we’ve partnered with The National Museum of Computing, located at the historic Bletchley Park, to open a new temporary exhibit dedicated to telling the story of the Raspberry Pi computer, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and the global community of innovators, learners, and educators we’re a part of.
In the exhibit, you’ll be able to get hands-on with Raspberry Pi computers, hear the story of how Raspberry Pi came to be, and see a few of the many ways that Raspberry Pi has made an impact on the world.
Join us for the exhibition opening
We know that not everyone will be able to experience the exhibit in person, and so we’ll live-stream the grand opening this Saturday 5 March 2022 at 11:15am GMT. Keep an eye on our social media channels for the link to watch the video feed. If you’re able to make it to the National Museum of Computing on Saturday, tickets are available to purchase.
As we’re coming to the end of Black History Month in the USA this year, we’ve been amazed by the variety of work the computing education community is doing to address inequities in their classrooms. For our part, we have learned a huge amount about equitable STEM and computer science (CS) education from the community, and through our own research.
In this post, we want to highlight two particular pieces of work that have influenced our work over the last year, shared by Dr Tia C. Madkins (University of Texas at Austin), Dr Nicol R. Howard (University of Redlands), and Dr Jakita O. Thomas (Auburn University, blackcomputeHER.org) at our research seminars.
Prof Tia C. MadkinsDr Nicol R. HowardDr Jakita O. Thomas
Moving beyond access and achievement, towards equity and justice
Tia C. Madkins and Nicol R. Howard described that educators in schools (and associated professionals) need to build an awareness of how the learning in their classrooms might be affected by:
Personal beliefs, ways of knowing or thinking, stereotypes, and the cultural lens of the educator and the learners
Power dynamics and intersectional identities
They say: “Instead of viewing learners as deficient individuals who we need to ‘fix’ in our classrooms, we use strengths-based approaches where we as educators learn to recognise, draw on, and build upon learners’ strengths and lived experiences.”
The researchers encourage educators to connect with learners’ cultural practices and lived experiences, and to foster and maintain relationships with learners’ families and communities, in order to work together to facilitate equitable, social justice–oriented CS learning
To hear from Tia, Nicol, and their collaborator Shomari Jones, watch their seminar. You can also read Tia and Nicol’s article in our seminar proceedings, where you’ll find a list of their recommended resources to explore this thinking further.
Valuing existing knowledge and lived experience as expertise
Jakita O. Thomas described findings from her research project based on a free enrichment programme exploring how Black middle-school girls develop computational algorithmic thinking skills in the context of game design.
The programme was intentionally designed to position Black girls as knowledge holders with valuable experiences, and to offer them opportunities to shape their identities as producers, innovators, and people who challenge deficit perspectives. These are perspectives that include implicit assumptions that privilege the values, beliefs, and practices of one group over another, especially where the groups are racially, ethnically, or culturally different.
Jakita emphasised that it’s very important for educators to ask the questions “STEM learning for what?”, “For whom?”, “How?”, and “To what ends?” when they consider how to bring STEM learning experiences to Black girls (or other young people with multiple marginal identities). Educators need an awareness that the economic reasons of STEM learning, which are commonly spotlighted, may not be sufficient to convince young people who are marginalised to engage in these subjects.
To hear more about this from Jakita directly, watch her seminar:
Empowering learners to be agents of change
One thing these researchers’ work makes clear is that the reasons for why learners choose to engage in CS education are many, and that gaining CS skills to prepare for the job market is only one of them.
In both seminars, the speakers emphasised how important it is for educators to contribute to their learners’ self-view as agents of change, not only by demonstrating how CS can be used to solve problems, but also by being open and direct about existing technological inequities. This teaches learners to use CS as a tool, and to also examine the social context in which CS is being applied, and the positive and negative consequences of these applications. Learning CS can empower young people to address challenges their communities face, and educators, learners, and families can work together through CS on social justice issues.
Putting the power of computing into the hands of young people is the core of our mission, and we have a research project underway right now that looks at equitable computing education in UK schools. Find out more about it here, and download our practical guide for teachers.
India’s rapidly digitising economy needs people with IT and programming skills, as well as skills such as creativity, unstructured problem solving, teamwork, and communication. Unfortunately, too many children in India currently do not have access to digital technologies, or to opportunities to learn these technical skills.
Roadblocks to accessing digital skills
Before children and young people in India can even get a chance to learn digital skills, many of them have to overcome numerous roadblocks. India’s digital divide is entrenched due to a lack of access to electricity, to the internet, and to digital devices. In 2017–18, only 47% of Indian households received electricity for more than 12 hours a day. Moreover, only 24% of households have internet access, with the figure dropping as low as 15% in rural regions.
During the coronavirus pandemic, when children in India had to plunge head-first into adapting to restrictions, 29 million students around the country did not have access to a digital device. In addition, only 38% of households in India are digitally literate. At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we define digital literacy as the skills and knowledge required to be an effective, safe, and discerning user of various computer systems. Digital literacy in rural regions stands far lower at 25%.
We partner with organisations in India
We are conscious that we cannot solve these massive access issues. Regardless, we are committed to moving the needle for those young people that need access to digital skills and digital literacy the most.
We partner with organisations around the country that are committed to bringing access to coding and digital skills to the most disadvantaged and digitally excluded young people. Our partnership model includes:
Co-designing learning experiences
Providing free, open-source learning resources
Designing bespoke training programmes
Supporting with technology solutions
The Pratham–Code Club programme for digital skills
Pratham means ‘first’ in Hindi, and rightly so: Pratham Education Foundation, a non-profit established in 1994, has been at the forefront of addressing gaps in the education system in India. In 2018, we joined hands with Pratham Education Foundation to introduce coding to children in hard-to-reach, disadvantaged communities around the country. We co-designed a Pratham–Code Club programme to provide youth in underserved communities with training and access to devices and learning resources. The goal of the training was to build the youth’s programming confidence so that they could go on to teach children in their communities.
To be effective, it was crucial that the programme be localised. We made adaptations to our learning resources and training content to make them more relevant to the context of the learners, and we worked with volunteer translators to translate the material into Hindi, Kannada, and Marathi.
We also provided the youth with training to use the PraDigi kit — an innovative, lightweight device, developed by Pratham Education Foundation and based on the Raspberry Pi computer — for teaching children to code.
Adapting the programme during the pandemic
In 2020, when we could no longer implement the programme the same way due to the pandemic and the ensuing disruptions, we made several adaptations:
Firstly, instead of the three-hour in-person training we had previously conducted, we hosted multiple 30-minute online sessions over a week, using cloud-based platforms like Zoom. Secondly, we used familiar apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Workplace to share the training content.
Finally, since the Pratham staff in the communities could not bring the PraDigi kits to the remote locations during lockdowns, we adapted the training content for smartphones and tablets, using the online Scratch editor and a phone-friendly online code editor called Repl.it.
Over the course of the pandemic, we trained 300 youth from Pratham’s communities in the basics of programming and digital skills. The impact was:
62% of youth said they were now interested in jobs that included coding skills
We also surveyed the youth for what non-technical skills they had learned during the training:
66% of youth reported that they had improved their problem-solving skills
60% of youth reported that they improved their communication skills
Where we are taking the programme next
Using a train-the-trainer model, we are now scaling our programme with Pratham Education Foundation to train 3000 youth from underserved communities. Once they have completed the training, we will help these 3000 youth pave the way to programming and digital skills for 15,000 young learners around the country.
We look forward to continuing our partnership with Pratham Education Foundation to make digital skills and coding education accessible to children all over India.
Our seminars in this series on AI and data science education, co-hosted with The Alan Turing Institute, have been covering a range of different topics and perspectives. This month was no exception. We were delighted to be able to host Tara Chklovski, CEO of Technovation, whose presentation was called ‘Teaching youth to use AI to tackle the Sustainable Development Goals’.
Tara Chklovski
The Technovation Challenge
Tara started Technovation, formerly called Iridescent, in 2007 with a family science programme in one school in Los Angeles. The nonprofit has grown hugely, and Technovation now runs computing education activities across the world. We heard from Tara that over 350,000 girls from more than 100 countries take part in their programmes, and that the nonprofit focuses particularly on empowering girls to become tech entrepreneurs. The girls, with support from industry volunteers, parents, and the Technovation curriculum, work in teams to solve real-world problems through an annual event called the Technovation Challenge. Working at scale with young people has given the Technovation team the opportunity to investigate the impact of their programmes as well as more generally learn what works in computing education.
Click to enlarge
Tara’s talk was extremely engaging (you’ll find the recording below), with videos of young people who had participated in recent years. Technovation works with volunteers and organisations to reach young people in communities where opportunities may be lacking, focussing on low- and middle-income countries. Tara spoke about the 900 million teenage girls in the world, a substantial number of whom live in countries where there is considerable inequality.
To illustrate the impact of the programme, Tara gave a number of examples of projects that students had developed, including:
An air quality sensor linked to messaging about climate change
A support circle for girls living in domestic violence situation
A project helping mothers communicate with their daughters
Support for water collection in Kenya
Early on, the Technovation Challenge had involved the creation of mobile apps, but in recent years, the projects have focused on using AI technologies to solve problems. An key message that Tara wanted to get across was that the focus on real-world problems and teamwork was as important, if not more, than the technical skills the young people were developing.
Developing AI-related projects in teams
Technovation has designed an online curriculum to support teams, who may have no prior computing experience, to learn how to design an AI project. Students work through units on topics such as data analysis and building datasets. As well as the technical activities, young people also work through activities on problem-solving approaches, design, and system thinking to help them tackle a real-world problem that is relevant to them. The curriculum supports teams to identify problems in their community and find a path to prototype and share an invention to tackle that problem.
Click to enlarge
While working through the curriculum, teams develop AI models to address the problem that they have chosen. They then submit them to a global competition for beginners, juniors, and seniors. Many of the girls enjoy the Technovation Challenge so much that they come back year on year to further develop their team skills.
AI Families: Children and parents using AI to solve problems
Technovation runs another programme, AI Families, that focuses on families working together to learn AI concepts and skills and use them to develop projects together. Families worked together with the help of educators to identify meaningful problems in their communities, and developed AI prototypes to address them.
There were 20,000 participants from under-resourced communities in 17 countries through 2018 and 2019. 70% of them were women (mothers and grandmothers) who wanted their children to participate; in this way the programme encouraged parents to be role models for their daughters, as well as enabling families to understand that AI is a tool that could be used to think about what problems in their community can be solved with the help of AI skills and principles. Tara was keen to emphasise that, given the importance of AI in the world, the more people know about it, the more impact they can make on their local communities.
The results of the AI Families project as investigated over 2018 and 2019 are reported in this paper. The findings of the programme included:
Learning needs to focus on more than just content; interviews showed that the learners needed to see the application to real-world applications
Engaging parents and other family members can support retention and a sense of community, and support a culture of lifelong learning
It takes around 3 to 5 years to iteratively develop fun, engaging, effective curriculum, training, and scalable programme delivery methods. This level of patience and commitment is needed from all community and industry partners and funders.
The research describes how the programme worked pre-pandemic. Tara highlighted that although the pandemic has prevented so much face-to-face team work, it has allowed some young people to access education online that they would not have otherwise had access to.
Many perspectives on AI education
Our goal is to listen to a variety of perspectives through this seminar series, and I felt that Tara really offered something fresh and engaging to our seminar audience, many of them (many of you!) regular attendees who we’ve got to know since we’ve been running the seminars. The seminar combined real-life stories with videos, as well as links to the curriculum used by Technovation to support learners of AI. The ‘question and answer’ session after the seminar focused on ways in which people could engage with the programme. On Twitter, one of the seminar participants declared this seminar “my favourite thus far in the series”. It was indeed very inspirational.
As we near the end of this series, we can start to reflect on what we’ve been learning from all the various speakers, and I intend to do this more formally in a month or two as we prepare Volume 3 of our seminar proceedings. While Tara’s emphasis is on motivating children to want to learn the latest technologies because they can see what they can achieve with them, some of our other speakers have considered the actual concepts we should be teaching, whether we have to change our approach to teaching computer science if we include AI, and how we should engage young learners in the ethics of AI.
Join us for our next seminar
I’m really looking forward to our final seminar in the series, with Stefania Druga, on Tuesday 1 March at 17:00–18:30 GMT. Stefania, PhD candidate at the University of Washington Information School, will also focus on families. In her talk ‘Democratising AI education with and for families’, she will consider the ways that children engage with smart, AI-enabled devices that they are becoming part of their everyday lives. It’s a perfect way to finish this series, and we hope you’ll join us.
Thanks to our seminars series, we are developing a list of AI education resources that seminar speakers and attendees share with us, plus the free resources we are developing at the Foundation. Please do take a look.
You can find all blog posts relating to our previous seminars on this page.
It’s time for young tech creators to share with the world what they’ve made! Coolest Projects Global 2022 registration is NOW OPEN. Starting today, young people can register their technology creation on the Coolest Projects Global website, where it will be featured in the online showcase gallery for the whole world to see.
By registering a tech project, you’ll represent your community, and you’ll get the coolest, limited-edition swag. You may even win a prize and earn the recognition of the special project judges.
What you need to know about Coolest Projects Global
Now in its 10th year, Coolest Projects is all about celebrating young people and what they create with code. Here’s what you need to know:
Coolest Projects Global is completely free for all participants around the world, and it’s entirely online.
Coolest Projects Global is open to tech creators up to 18 years old, working independently or in teams of up to 5.
We welcome creators of all skill levels: this world-leading technology showcase is for young people who are coding their very first project, or who are already experienced, or anything in between.
You’re invited to a live online celebration, which we will live-stream in early June — more details to follow.
Opening today, project registration stays open until 11 May.
Projects can be registered in the following categories: Scratch, games, web, mobile apps, hardware, and advanced programming.
Judges will evaluate projects based on their coolness, complexity, design, usability, and presentation.
Here are just a few of the reasons why young tech creators should register their project for the Coolest Projects Global showcase:
Share your project with the world. Coolest Projects Global is the world’s leading technology showcase for young people, and it’s your chance to shine on the global stage.
Get feedback on your project. A great team of judges will check out your project and give you feedback, which will land in your inbox after registration closes.
Earn some swag. Every creator who registers a project will be eligible to receive some limited-edition digital or physical swag. Pssst… Check out the sneak peek below.
Win a prize. Creators of projects that are selected as the judges’ favourites in the six showcase categories will receive a Coolest Projects medal to commemorate their accomplishment. The judges’ favourites will be announced at our live online celebration in June.
If you don’t have a tech project or an idea for one yet, you’ve got plenty of time to imagine and create, and we’re here to support you. Check out our guides to designing and building a tech creation — one that you’ll be proud to share with the Coolest Projects community in the online showcase gallery. And there’s no shortage of inspiration among the projects that young tech creators shared in last year’s showcase gallery.
We have a lot more exciting stuff to share about Coolest Projects Global in the coming months, so be sure to subscribe for email updates. Until next time… be cool, creators!
A hint at the swag Coolest Projects Global participants will receive 👀
Python is a programming language that’s popular with learners and educators in clubs and schools. It also is widely used by professional programmers, particularly in the data science field. Many educators and young people like how similar the Python syntax is to the English language.
That’s why Python is often the first text-based language that young people learn to program in. The familiar syntax can lower the barrier to taking the first steps away from a block-based programming environment, such as Scratch.
In 2021, Python ranked in first place in an industry-standard popularity index of a major software quality assessment company, confirming its favoured position in software engineering. Python is, for example, championed by Google and used in many of its applications.
Coding for kids in Python
Python’s popularity means there are many excellent resources for learning this language. These resources often focus on creating programs that produce text outputs. We wanted to do something different.
Our new ‘Introduction to Python’ project path focuses on creating digital visuals using the Python p5 library. This library is like a set of tools that allows you to get creative by using Python code to draw shapes, edit images, and create frame-by-frame animations. That makes it the perfect choice for young learners: they can develop their knowledge and skills in Python programming while creating cool visuals that they’ll be proud of.
What is in the ‘Introduction to Python’ path?
The ‘Introduction to Python’ project path is designed according to our Digital Making Framework, encouraging learners to become independent coders and digital makers by gently removing scaffolding as they progress along the projects in a path. Paths begin with three Explore projects, in which learners are guided through tasks that introduce them to new coding skills. Next, learners complete two Design projects. Here, they are encouraged to practise their skills and bring in their own interests to personalise their coding creations. Finally, learners complete one Invent project. This is where they put everything that they have learned together and create something unique that matters to them.
Emoji, archery, rockets, art, and movement are all part of this Python path.
The structure of our Digital Making Framework means that learners experience the structured development process of a coding project and learn how to turn their ideas into reality. The Framework also supports with finding errors in their code (debugging), showing them that errors are a part of computer programming and just temporary setbacks that you can overcome.
What coding skills and knowledge will young people learn?
The Explore projects are where the initial learning takes place. The key programming concepts covered in this path are:
Variables
Performing calculations with variables
Using functions
Using selection (if, elif and else)
Using repetition (for loops)
Using randomisation
Importing from libraries
Learners also explore aspects of digital visual media concepts:
Coordinates
RGB colours
Screen size
Layers
Frames and animation
Learners then develop these skills and knowledge by putting them into practice in the Design and Invent projects, where they add in their own ideas and creativity.
Explore project 1: Hello world emoji
In the first Explore project of this path, learners create an interactive program that uses emoji characters as the visual element.
This is the first step into Python and gets learners used to the syntax for printing text, using variables, and defining functions.
Explore project 2: Target practice
In this Explore project, learners create an archery game. They are introduced to the p5 library, which they use to draw an archery board and create the arrows.
The new programming concept covered in this project is selection, where learners use if, elif and else to allocate points for the game.
Explore project 3: Rocket launch
The final Explore project gets learners to animate a rocket launching into space. They create an interactive animation where the user is asked to enter an amount of fuel for the rocket launch. The animation then shows if the fuel is enough to get the rocket into orbit.
The new programming concept covered here is repetition. Learners use for loops to animate smoke coming from the exhaust of the rocket.
Design project 1: Make a face
The first Design project allows learners to unleash their creativity by drawing a face using the Python coding skills that they have built in the Explore projects. They have full control of the design for their face and can explore three examples for inspiration.
Learners are also encouraged to share their drawings in the community library, where there are lots of fun projects to discover already. In this project, learners apply all of the coding skills and knowledge covered in the Explore projects, including selection, repetition, and variables.
Design project 2: Don’t collide!
In the second Design project, learners code a scrolling game called ‘Don’t collide’, where a character or vehicle moves down the screen while having to avoid obstacles.
Learners can choose their own theme for the game, and decide what will move down the screen and what the obstacles will look like. In this project, they also get to practice everything they learned in the Explore projects.
Invent project: Powerful patterns
This project is the ultimate chance for learners to put all of their skills and knowledge into practice and get creative. They design their own unique patterns and create frame-by-frame animations.
The Invent project offers ingredients, which are short reminders of all the key skills that learners have gained while completing the previous projects in the path. The ingredients encourage them to be independent whilst also supporting them with code snippets to help them along.
We have written the projects in the path with young people around the age of 9 to 13 in mind. To code in a text-based language, a young person needs to be familiar with using a keyboard, due to the typing involved. A learner may have completed one of our Scratch paths prior to this one, but this isn’t essential. and we encourage beginner coders to take this path first if that is their choice.
What software do learners need to code these projects?
A web browser. In every project, starter code is provided in a free web-based development environment called Trinket, where learners add their own code. The starter Trinkets include everything that learners need to use Python and access the p5 library.
If preferred, the projects also include instructions for using a desktop-based programming environment, such as Thonny.
How long will the path take to complete?
We’ve designed the path to be completed in around six one-hour sessions, with one hour per project. However, the project instructions encourage learners to upgrade their projects and go further if they wish. This means that young people might want to spend a little more time getting their projects exactly as they imagine them.
What can young people do next after completing this path?
Taking part in Coolest Projects Global
At the end of the path, learners are encouraged to register a project they’re making with their new coding skills for Coolest Projects Global, our world-leading online technology showcase for young people.
Taking part is free, all online, and beginners as well as more experienced young tech creators are welcome and invited. This is their unique opportunity to share their ingenuity in an online gallery for the world and the Coolest Projects community to celebrate.
Coding more Python projects with us
Coming very soon is our ‘More Python’ path. In this path, learners will move beyond the basics they learned in Introduction to Python. They will learn how to use lists, dictionaries, and files to create charts, models, and artwork. Keep your eye on our blog and social media for the release of ‘More Python’.
Are you curious about coding and computer programming but don’t know how to begin? Do you want to help your children at home, or learners in your school, with their digital skills, but you’re not very confident yet? Then our new, free, and on-demand online course Introduction to Programming with Scratch course is a fun, creative, and colourful starting point for you.
On this on-demand course, Mark and Vasu from our team will help you take your very first steps on your programming journey.
You can code — we’ll show you how
On the course, you’ll use the programming language Scratch, a beginner-friendly, visual programming language particularly suitable for creating animations and games. All you need is our course and a computer or tablet with a web browser and internet connection that can access the online Scratch editor.
You can code in Scratch without having to memorise and type in commands. Instead, by snapping blocks together, you’ll take control of ‘sprites’, which are characters and objects on the screen that you can move around with the code you create.
This is how you build Scratch programs.
As well as learning what you can do with Scratch, you’ll be learning basic programming concepts that are the same for all programming languages. You’ll see how the order of commands is important (sequencing), you’ll make the computer repeat actions (repetition), and you’ll write programs that do different things in different circumstances, for example responding to your user’s actions (selection). Later on, you’ll also make your own reusable code blocks (abstraction).
You can create your own programs and share them
Throughout the course you’ll learn to make your own programs step by step. In the final week, Mark and Vasu will show you how you can create musical projects and interact with your program using a webcam.
By the end of the course, you will create a program to control a Scratch character using your live webcam video.
Vasu and Mark will encourage you to share your programs and join the Scratch online community. You will discover how you can explore other people’s Scratch programs for inspiration and support, and how to build on the code they’ve created.
Thousands of people share their projects in the Scratch online community — you could be one of them.
Sign up for the course now!
The course starts for the first time on Monday 14 February, but it is available on demand, so you can join it at any time. You’ll get four weeks’ access to the course no matter when you sign up.
For the first four weeks that the course is available, and every three months after that, people from our team will join in to support you and help answer your questions in the comments sections.
You can find more free resources here! These are the newest Scratch pathways on our project site, which you can also share with the young people in your life:
Back in October, I wrote about a report that the Brookings Institution, a US think tank, had published about the provision of computer science in schools around the world. Brookings conducted a huge amount of research on computer science curricula in a range of countries, and the report gives a very varied picture. However, we believe that, to see a more complete picture, it’s also important to gather teachers’ own perspectives on their teaching.
Complete our survey for computing teachers
Experiences shared by teachers on the ground can give important insights to educators and researchers as well as to policymakers, and can be used to understand both gaps in provision and what is working well.
Today we launch a survey for computing teachers across Ireland and the UK. The purpose of this survey is to find out about the experiences of computing teachers across the UK and Ireland, including what you teach, your approaches to teaching, and professional development opportunities that you have found useful. You can access it by clicking one of these buttons:
Open to all early years, primary, secondary, sixth-form, and further education teachers in Ireland, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales who have taught any computing or computer science (even a tiny bit) in the last year
Available in English, Welsh, Gaelic, and Irish/Gaeilge
Anonymous, and we aim to make the data openly available, in line with our commitment to open-source data; the survey collects no personal data
Designed to take you 20 to 25 minutes to complete
The survey will be open for four weeks, until 7 March. When you complete the survey, you’ll have the opportunity to enter a prize draw for a £50 book token per week, so if you complete the survey in the first week, you automatically get four chances to win a token!
We’re aiming for 1000 teachers to complete the survey, so please do fill it in and share it with your colleagues. If you can help us now, we’ll be able to share the survey findings on this website and other channels in the summer.
“Computing education in Ireland — as in many other countries — has changed so much in the last decade, and perhaps even more so in the last few years. Understanding teachers’ views is vital for so many reasons: to help develop, inform, and steer much-needed professional development; to inform policymakers on actions that will have positive effects for teachers working in the classroom; and to help researchers identify and conduct research in areas that will have real impact on and for teachers.”
– Keith Quille (Technological University Dublin), member of the research project team
What computing is taught in the UK and Ireland?
There are key differences in the provision of computer science and computing education across the UK and Ireland, not least what we all call the subject.
In England, the mandatory national curriculum subject is called Computing, but for learners electing to take qualifications such as GCSE and A level, the subject is called computer science. Computing is taught in all schools from age 5, and is a broad subject covering digital literacy as well as elements of computer science, such as algorithms and programming; networking; and computer architecture.
In Northern Ireland, the teaching curriculum involves developing Cross-Curricular Skills (CCS) and Thinking Skills and Personal Capabilities. This means that from the Early Years Foundation Stage to the end of key stage 3, “using ICT” is one of the three statutory CCS, alongside “communication” and “using mathematics”, which must be included in lessons. At GCSE and A level, the subject (for those who select it) is called Digital Technology, with GCSE students being able to choose between GCSE Digital Technology (Multimedia) and GCSE Digital Technology (Programming).
In Scotland, the Curriculum for Excellence is divided into two phases: the broad general education (BGE) and the senior phase. In the BGE, from age 3 to 15 (the end of the third year of secondary school), all children and young people are entitled to a computing science curriculum as part of the Technologies framework. In S4 to S6, young people may choose to extend and deepen their learning in computing science through National and Higher qualification courses.
In Wales, computer science will be part of a new Science & Technology area of learning and experience for all learners aged 3-16. Digital competence is also a statutory cross-curricular skill alongside literacy and numeracy; this includes Citizenship; Interacting and collaborating; Producing; and Data and computational thinking. Wales offers a new GCSE and A level Digital Technology, as well as GCSE and A level Computer Science.
Ireland has introduced the Computer Science for Leaving Certificate as an optional subject (age ranges typically from 15 to 18), after a pilot phase which began in 2018. The Leaving Certificate subject includes three strands: practices and principles; core concepts; and computer science in practice. At junior cycle level (age ranges typically from 12 to 15), an optional short course in coding is now available. The short course has three strands: Computer science introduction; Let’s get connected; and Coding at the next level.
What is the survey?
The survey is a localised and slightly adapted version of METRECC, which is a comprehensive and validated survey tool developed in 2019 to benchmark and measure developments of the teaching and learning of computing in formal education systems around the world. METRECC stands for ‘MEasuring TeacheR Enacted Computing Curriculum’. The METRECC survey has ten categories of questions and is designed to be completed by practising computing teachers.
Using existing standardised survey instruments is good research practice, as it increases the reliability and validity of the results. In 2019, METRECC was used to survey teachers in England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Australia, and the USA. It was subsequently revised and has been used more recently to survey computing teachers in South Asia and in four countries in Africa.
With sufficient responses, we hope to be able to report on the resources and classroom practices of computing teachers, as well as on their access to professional development opportunities. This will enable us to not only compare the UK’s four devolved nations and Ireland, but also to report on aspects of the teaching of computing in general, and on how teachers perceive the teaching of the subject. As computing is a relatively new subject whatever country you are in, it’s crucial to gather and analyse this information so that we can develop our understanding of the teaching of computing.
The research team
For this project, we are working as a team of researchers across the UK and Ireland. Together we have a breadth of experience around the development of computing as a school subject (using this broad term to also cover digital competencies and digital technology) in our respective countries. We also have experience of quantitative research and reporting, and we are aiming to publish the results in an academic journal as well as disseminate them to a wider audience.
In alphabetical order, on the team are:
Elizabeth Cole, who researches early years and primary programming education at the Centre for Computing Science Education (CCSE), University of Glasgow
Tom Crick, who is Professor of Digital Education & Policy at Swansea University and has been involved in policy development around computing in Wales for many years
Diana Kirby, who is a Programme Coordinator at the Raspberry Pi Foundation
Nicola Looker, who is a Lecturer in Secondary Education at Edgehill University, and a PhD student at CCSE, University of Glasgow, researching programming pedagogy
Keith Quille, who is a Senior Lecturer in Computing at Technological University Dublin
In addition, Dr Irene Bell, Stranmillis University College, Belfast, has been assisting the team to ensure that the survey is applicable for teachers in Northern Ireland. Keith, Sue, and Elizabeth were part of the original team that designed the survey in 2019.
We set out last year to gather more stories, ideas, and inspiration from and for the computing education community in between Hello World magazine issues: we launched the Hello World podcast. On the podcast, we dive deeper into articles from Hello World, and we speak with people from all over the world who work as teachers, educators, and other computing education professionals.
Season 3 of the Hello World podcast starts on Monday
The Hello World podcast helps connect the global community of computing educators and Hello World readers, and lets them share their experiences. After two seasons and a short pause during the autumn, we are finally back with a brand-new Hello World podcast season. Regular listeners will also notice a new theme music!
Each episode, we explore computing, coding, and digital making education by delving into an exciting topic together with our guests: experts, practitioners, and other members of the Hello World community.
In season 3, we’re exploring:
The role of makerspaces, both within schools and the wider community
The relevance of imagination and storytelling to computing
Computing in the context of science and ecology
How learners can promote and support computing as digital leaders
And much more…
Meet our guests for episode 1 of the new season
In our first episode, which will be available from 7 February, your hosts Carrie Anne and James ask the question “What role do makerspaces play in the classroom?”. We talk to two fantastic guests, each with a wealth of experience in designing and developing makerspaces:
Nick Provenzano
Nick Provenzano, who is a Teacher and Makerspace Director at University Liggett School in Michigan. He is also an author, makerspace builder, international keynote speaker and Raspberry Pi Certified Educator.
Chris Hillidge
Chris Hillidge, who established FabLab Warrington in 2016 and manages the STEM strategy for students aged 4 to 19 across The Challenge Academy Trust. Chris is a Specialist Leader of Education, consultant, and Raspberry Pi Certified Educator.
Dive in with our three most popular episodes so far
If you’ve not tried out the Hello World podcast yet, why not get started by diving into one of our most popular episodes?
You’ll find the upcoming season and past episodes on your favourite podcast platform, where you can also subscribe to never miss an episode. Alternatively, you can listen via your browser at helloworld.cc/podcast.
* {
box-sizing: border-box;
}
.header {
text-align: center;
padding: 32px;
}
.row {
display: -ms-flexbox; /* IE10 */
display: flex;
-ms-flex-wrap: wrap; /* IE10 */
flex-wrap: wrap;
padding: 0 4px;
vertical-align: top;
text-align: center;
align-items: flex-start
}
/* Create four equal columns that sits next to each other */
.column {
-ms-flex: 33%; /* IE10 */
flex: 33%;
max-width: 33%;
padding: 0 4px;
align-items: flex-start
}
.column img {
margin-top: 0px;
vertical-align: top;
width: 100%;
}
.column figure {
margin-top: 0px;
vertical-align: top;
}
/* Responsive layout – makes a two column-layout instead of four columns */
@media screen and (max-width: 900px) {
.column {
-ms-flex: 50%;
flex: 50%;
max-width: 50%;
}
}
/* Responsive layout – makes the two columns stack on top of each other instead of next to each other */
@media screen and (max-width: 400px) {
.column {
-ms-flex: 100%;
flex: 100%;
max-width: 100%;
}
}
For those of us living in the USA, February is Black History Month, our month-long celebration of Black history. This is an occasion to highlight the amazing accomplishments of Black Americans through time. Simply put, the possibilities are endless! Black history touches every area of our lives, and it is so important that we seize the opportunity to honor Black freedom fighters who fought for the equality and freedom of ALL people.
That’s why we encourage you to join us in celebrating Black History Month with the help of free, specially chosen coding and computing education resources. We’ve got something for everyone: whether you’re a learner, an educator, a volunteer, or any lover of tech, everyone can participate.
For learners: Celebrate Black History Month with free coding resources
This month, we want to empower young people to think about how they can use code as a tool to celebrate Black history with innovation and creativity. We’ve designed a project card listing the perfect projects to jumpstart young learners’ imagination:
Take some time this month to explore the following resources to make sure we’re growing into a more diverse and inclusive community:
Culturally relevant pedagogy guide: We’ve worked with a group of teachers and researchers to co-create a guide sharing the key elements of a culturally relevant and responsive teaching approach to curriculum design and teaching in the classroom. Download the guide to see how to teach computing and computer science in a way that values all your learners’ knowledge, ways of learning, and heritage.
Uplifting Black voices is one of the best things we can all do this February in observance of Black History Month. We’ve had the privilege of hearing from members in our community about their experiences in tech, and their stories are incredibly insightful and inspiring.
Meet Yolanda Payne, a highly regarded community member from Atlanta, Georgia who is passionate about connecting young people in her community to opportunities to create with technology.
Since last year, we have been investigating culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching in computing education. This is an important part of our research to understand how to make computing accessible to all young people. We are now continuing our work in this area with a new project called Roots, bridging our research team here at the Foundation and the team at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, which we jointly created with the University of Cambridge in its Department of Computer Science and Technology.
Across both organisations, we’ve got great ambitions for the Centre, and I’m delighted to have been appointed as its Director. It’s a great privilege to lead this work.
What do we mean by culturally relevant pedagogy?
Culturally relevant pedagogy is a framework for teaching that emphasises the importance of incorporating and valuing all learners’ knowledge, ways of learning, and heritage. It promotes the development of learners’ critical consciousness of the world and encourages them to ask questions about ethics, power, privilege, and social justice. Culturally relevant pedagogy emphasises opportunities to address issues that are important to learners and their communities.
Culturally responsive teaching builds on the framework above to identify a range of teaching practices that can be implemented in the classroom. These include:
Drawing on learners’ cultural knowledge and experiences to inform the curriculum
Providing opportunities for learners to choose personally meaningful projects and express their own cultural identities
The video below is an introduction for teachers who may not be familiar with the topic, showing the perspectives of three members of the working group and their students. You can also find other resources that resulted from this first phase of the work, and read our Special Projects Report.
We’re really excited that, having developed the guidelines, we can now focus on how culturally responsive computing teaching can be implemented in English schools through the Roots project, a new, related project supported by funding from Google. This funding continues Google’s commitment to grow the impact of computer science education in schools, which included a £1 million donation to support us and other organisations to develop online courses for teachers.
The next phase of work: Roots
In our new Roots project, we want to learn from practitioners how culturally responsive computing teaching can be implemented in classrooms in England, by supporting teachers to plan activities, and listening carefully to their experiences in school. Our approach is similar to the Research-Practice-Partnership (RPP) approach used extensively in the USA to develop research in computing education; this approach hasn’t yet been used in the UK. In this way, we hope to further develop and improve the guidelines with exemplars and case studies, and to increase our understanding of teachers’ motivations and beliefs with respect to culturally responsive computing teaching.
The pilot phase of the Roots project starts this month and will run until December 2022. During this phase, we will work with a small group of schools around London, Essex, and Cambridgeshire. Longer-term, we aim to scale up this work across the UK.
The project will be centred around two workshops held in participating teachers’ schools during the first half of the year. In the first workshop, teachers will work together with facilitators from the Foundation and the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre to discuss culturally responsive computing teaching and how to make use of the guidelines in adapting existing lessons and programmes of study. The second workshop will take place after the teachers have implemented the guidelines in their classroom, and it will be structured around a discussion of the teachers’ experiences and suggestions for iteration of the guidelines. We will also be using a visual research methodology to create a number of videos representing the new knowledge gleaned from all participants’ experiences of the project. We’re looking forward to sharing the results of the project later on in the year.
Polly Card
Saman Rizvi
Katie Vanderpere-Brown
We’re delighted that Dr Polly Card will be leading the work on this project at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, University of Cambridge, together with Saman Rizvi in the Foundation’s research team and Katie Vanderpere-Brown, Assistant Headteacher, Saffron Walden County High School, Essex and Computing Lead of the NCCE London, Hertfordshire and Essex Computing Hub.
More about equity, diversity, and inclusion in computing education
We hold monthly research seminars here at the Foundation, and in the first half of 2021, we invited speakers who focus on a range of topics relating to equity, diversity, and inclusion in computing education.
As well as holding seminars and building a community of interested people around them, we share the insights from speakers and attendees through video recordings of the sessions, blog posts, and the speakers’ presentation slides. We also publish a series of seminar proceedings with referenced chapters written by the speakers.
In this blog post we explore good practices around creating online computing questions, specifically multiple choice questions (MCQs). Multiple choice questions are a popular way to help teachers and learners work out the next steps in learning, and to assess learning in examinations. As a case study, we look at some data related to learner responses to computing questions on the Oak National Academy platform.
The case study illustrates the many things MCQ authors have to think about while designing questions, and that there is much more research needed to understand how to get an MCQ “just right”.
Uses of multiple choice questions
Online auto-marked MCQs are now being integrated into classroom activities, set as homework, and used in self-led learning at home. Software products involving MCQs, such as Kahoot and Socratic, are easy to use for many, and have become popular in some learning contexts. MCQ may have become more prevalent due to increased online teaching and the availability of whole curricula through platforms such as the Oak National Academy.
Think about the thinking processes the learner will use when answering the question, and make sure the processes are productive for their learning
Don’t make the question super easy or too difficult, but make it challenging — the difficulty needs to be “just right”
Keep the phrasing of the question simple
Ensure that all answers are plausible; providing three or four answers is usually a good idea
Be aware that if learners pick the wrong answer, this can reinforce the wrong thinking
Provide corrective feedback to learners who pick the wrong answer
What I find particularly interesting about Andrew’s advice is the need to make the difficulty of the MCQ “just right” for learners. But what does “just right” look like in practice? More research is needed to work this out.
The anatomy of a multiple choice question
When talking about MCQs, there are technical terms to describe question features, e.g.:
Incorrect answers are called distractors (or lures)
A distractor is defined as plausible if it’s an answer a layperson would see as a reasonable answer
Plausible distractors are called working distractors
Over this period of four months, learners on the platform made more than 29,000 question attempts on the thirty-five questions across the nine lessons that make up this data representation unit. Here is a breakdown of the questions by topic area:
Responses to MCQs in the GCSE Computer Science data representation unit on Oak National Academy, data from February 2021 to end of May 2021 (click to enlarge)
As shown in the table, more questions relate to binary arithmetic than to any other topic area. This was a specific design decision, as it is well-known that learners need lots of practice of the processes involved in answering binary arithmetic questions.
Let’s look at an example question from the binary arithmetic topic area, with one correct answer and two distractors. The learning objective being addressed with this question is ‘Perform addition in binary on two binary numbers’.
One of the MCQs in the GCSE Computer Science data representation unit on the Oak National Academy, as displayed on the online platform
As shown in the table below, in four months, 1170 attempts were made to answer the example question. 65% of the attempts were correct responses, and 35% were not, with 21% of responses being distractor b, and 14% distractor c. These distractors appear to be working distractors, as they were chosen by more than 5% of learners, which has been suggested as a rule-of-thumb threshold that distractors have to clear to be classed as working.
Example MCQ in the GCSE Computer Science data representation unit on the Oak National Academy, plus response data from February 2021 to end of May 2021 (click to enlarge)
However, because of the lack of research into MCQs, we cannot say for certain that this question is “just right” — it may be too hard. We need to do further research to find this out.
Creating multiple choice questions is not easy
The process of creating good MCQs is not an easy task, because question authors need to think about many things, including:
What learning objectives are to be addressed
What plausible distractors can be used
What level of difficulty is right for learners
What type of thinking the questions are encouraging, and how this is useful for learners
In order for MCQs to be useful for learners and teachers, much more research is needed in this area to show how to reliably produce MCQs that are “just right” and encourage productive thinking processes. We are very much looking forward to looking at this topic in our research work.
To find out more about the computing education research we are doing, you can browse our website, take part in our monthly seminars, and read our publications.
What is AI thinking? What concepts should we introduce to young people related to AI, including machine learning (ML), and data science? Should we teach with a glass-box or an opaque-box approach? These are the questions we’ve been grappling with since we started our online research seminar series on AI education at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, co-hosted with The Alan Turing Institute.
Dave Touretzky
Fred G. Martin
Over the past few months, we’d already heard from researchers from the UK, Germany, and Finland. This month we virtually travelled to the USA, to hear from Prof. Dave Touretzky (Carnegie Mellon University) and Prof. Fred G. Martin (University of Massachusetts Lowell), who have pioneered the influential AI4K12 project together with their colleagues Deborah Seehorn and Christina Gardner-McLure.
The AI4K12 project
The AI4K12 project focuses on teaching AI in K-12 in the US. The AI4K12 team have aligned their vision for AI education to the CSTA standards for computer science education. These Standards, published in 2017, describe what should be taught in US schools across the discipline of computer science, but they say very little about AI. This was the stimulus for starting the AI4K12 initiative in 2018. A number of members of the AI4K12 working group are practitioners in the classroom who’ve made a huge contribution in taking this project from ideas into the classroom.
Dave gave us an overview of the AI4K12 project (click to enlarge)
The project has a number of goals. One is to develop a curated resource directory for K-12 teachers, and another to create a community of K-12 resource developers. On the AI4K12.org website, you can find links to many resources and sign up for their mailing list. I’ve been subscribed to this list for a while now, and fascinating discussions and resources have been shared.
Five Big Ideas of AI4K12
If you’ve heard of AI4K12 before, it’s probably because of the Five Big Ideas the team has set out to encompass the AI field from the perspective of school-aged children. These ideas are:
Perception — the idea that computers perceive the world through sensing
Representation and reasoning — the idea that agents maintain representations of the world and use them for reasoning
Learning — the idea that computers can learn from data
Natural interaction — the idea that intelligent agents require many types of knowledge to interact naturally with humans
Societal impact — the idea that artificial intelligence can impact society in both positive and negative ways
Sometimes we hear concerns that resources being developed to teach AI concepts to young people are narrowly focused on machine learning, particularly supervised learning for classification. It’s clear from the AI4K12 Five Big Ideas that the team’s definition of the AI field encompasses much more than one area of ML. Despite being developed for a US audience, I believe the description laid out in these five ideas is immensely useful to all educators, researchers, and policymakers around the world who are interested in AI education.
Fred explained how ‘representation and reasoning’ is a big idea in the AI field (click to enlarge)
During the seminar, Dave and Fred shared some great practical examples. Fred explained how the big ideas translate into learning outcomes at each of the four age groups (ages 5–8, 9–11, 12–14, 15–18). You can find out more about their examples in their presentation slides or the seminar recording (see below).
I was struck by how much the AI4K12 team has thought about progression — what you learn when, and in which sequence — which we do really need to understand well before we can start to teach AI in any formal way. For example, looking at how we might teach visual perceptionto young people, children might start when very young by using a tool such as Teachable Machine to understand that they can teach a computer to recognise what they want it to see, then move on to building an application using Scratch plugins or Calypso, and then to learning the different levels of visual structure and understanding the abstraction pipeline — the hierarchy of increasingly abstract things. Talking about visual perception, Fred used the example of self-driving cars and how they represent images.
Fred used this slide to describe how young people might learn abstracted elements of visual structure
AI education with an age-appropriate, glass-box approach
Dave and Fred support teaching AI to children using a glass-box approach. By ‘glass-box approach’ we mean that we should give students information about how AI systems work, and show the inner workings, so to speak. The opposite would be a ‘opaque-box approach’, by which we mean showing students an AI system’s inputs and the outputs only to demonstrate what AI is capable of, without trying to teach any technical detail.
AI4K12 teacher guidelines for AI education
Our speakers are keen for learners to understand, at an age-appropriate level, what is going on “inside” an AI system, not just what the system can do. They believe it’s important for young people to build mental models of how AI systems work, and that when the young people get older, they should be able to use their increasing knowledge and skills to develop their own AI applications. This aligns with the views of some of our previous seminar speakers, including Finnish researchers Matti Tedre and Henriikka Vartiainen, who presented at our seminar series in November.
What is AI thinking?
Dave addressed the question of what AI thinking looks like in school. His approach was to start with computational thinking (he used the example of the Barefoot project’s description of computational thinking as a starting point) and describe AI thinking as an extension that includes the following skills:
Perception
Reasoning
Representation
Machine learning
Language understanding
Autonomous robots
Dave described AI thinking as furthering the ideas of abstraction and algorithmic thinking commonly associated with computational thinking, stating that in the case of AI, computation actually is thinking. My own view is that to fully define AI thinking, we need to dig a bit deeper into, for example, what is involved in developing an understanding of perception and representation.
Thinking back to Matti Tedre and Henriikka Vartainen’s description of CT 2.0, which focuses only on the ‘Learning’ aspect of the AI4K12 Five Big Ideas, and on the distinct ways of thinking underlying data-driven programming and traditional programming, we can see some differences between how the two groups of researchers describe the thinking skills young people need in order to understand and develop AI systems. Tedre and Vartainen are working on a more finely granular description of ML thinking, which has the potential to impact the way we teach ML in school.
What I take from this is that there is much still to research and discuss in this area! It’s a real privilege to be able to hear from experts in the field and compare and contrast different standpoints and views.
Resources for AI education
The AI4K12 project has already made a massive contribution to the field of AI education, and we were delighted to hear that Dave, Fred, and their colleagues have just been awarded the AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator Award for 2022 for AI4K12.org. An amazing achievement! Particularly useful about this website is that it links to many resources, and that the Five Big Ideas give a framework for these resources.
Through our seminars series, we are developing our own list of AI education resources shared by seminar speakers or attendees, or developed by us. Please do take a look.
Join our next seminar
Through these seminars, we’re learning a lot about AI education and what it might look like in school, and we’re having great discussions during the Q&A section.
It’s time to start your countdown! Young people from all over the world will soon be invited to share their digital creations at Coolest Projects Global 2022, our world-leading online technology showcase event for young creators. In mid-February, project registration opens for a new and improved, online-only experience.
Through Coolest Projects Global, young creators can register their digital projects to share them with the world, represent their country, get some free swag, and maybe even win recognition from our special judges. And the best thing: Coolest Projects participants join a global community of awesome young tech creators who celebrate each other’s accomplishments.
Here’s what you should know about Coolest Projects Global
Coolest Projects Global is free and open to young creators up to 18 years old, working independently or in teams of up to 5 creators.
Creators of all skill levels are encouraged to participate. Coolest Projects is for young people who are beginners, or advanced, or anything in between.
Project registration opens on 14 February and stays open until 11 May.
Projects can be registered in the following categories: Scratch, games, web, mobile apps, hardware, and advanced programming.
Judges will evaluate projects based on their coolness, complexity, design, usability, and presentation.
Coolest Projects Global is a completely free event for all participants, and it’s entirely online.
What’s new in 2022?
Coolest Projects is celebrating its TENTH YEAR of shining a light on young creators, so we have an extra special showcase lined up in 2022. All of these enhancements are the result of incredibly helpful feedback that past creators have shared. Here’s a sneak peek at what you can look forward to:
Creators will receive project feedback from the judges after the celebration event in June. The celebration will be streamed live online in early June. Stay tuned for more details as the event gets closer.
Creators will be eligible to receive limited-edition digital and physical swag.
Creators will be able to categorise their project into topics such as health, environment, community, art, and more.
Creators who have projects selected as favourites by the special judges will receive a commemorative medal.
What do young people say is so cool about Coolest Projects?
We asked past creators what they think makes Coolest Projects so cool, and here’s what they had to say:
“The freedom we had to create whatever we want!”
“We can get inspiration from sharing our ideas about real-life situations.”
“Seeing all the different ideas people had and how they went about doing their projects.”
“The opportunity to let the creativity flow and participate at a global level.”
Project registration opens on 14 February, but creators can start making their projects now. For inspiration, check out last year’s project gallery and then sign up to receive email updates so that you don’t miss a thing about Coolest Projects. We have many more exciting details coming in the next weeks and months, so stay tuned.
Today we’re releasing an exciting new path of projects for young people who want to create 3D worlds, stories, and games. We’ve partnered with Unity to offer any young person, anywhere, the opportunity to take their first steps in creating virtual worlds using real-time 3D.
The Unity Charitable Fund, a fund of the Tides Foundation, has awarded us a generous grant for $50,000 to help underrepresented youth learn to use Unity, upleveling their skills for future career success.
Create a world, don’t just explore it
Our new path of six projects for Unity is a learning journey for young people who have some experience of text-based programming and now want to try out building digital 3D creations.
Unity is the world’s leading platform for creating and operating real-time 3D and is hugely popular for creating 3D video games and virtual, interactive worlds and stories. The best thing about it for young people? While professional developers use Unity to create well-known games such as Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl and Among Us, it is also free for anyone to use.
Young people who learn to use Unity can do more and more complex things with it as they gain experience. Many successful indie games have been made in Unity — maybe a young person you know will create the next indie game sensation!
For young people, our new project path is the ideal introduction to Unity.The new project path:
Is for learners who have already coded some projects in Python or another text-based language.
Introduces the Unity software and how to write code for it in the programming language C# (pronounced ‘cee sharp’).
Guides learners to create a 3D role playing game or interactive story that they can tailor to suit their imaginations. Learners gain more and more independence with each project in the path.
Covers common elements such as non-playable characters, mini games, and bonuses.
After young people have completed the path, they’ll have:
Created their very own 3D video game or interactive story they can share with their friends and family.
Gained familiarity with key functions of Unity.
Built the independence and confidence to explore Unity further and create more advanced games and 3D worlds.
Young people gain real-world skills while creating worlds in Unity
Since Unity is a platform used by professional digital creators, young people who follow our new Unity path gain real-world skills that are sought after in the tech sector. While they learn to express their creativity with Unity, young people improve their coding and problem-solving skills and feel empowered because they get to use their imagination to bring their ideas to life.
“Providing opportunities for underrepresented youth to learn critical tech skills is essential to Unity Social Impact’s mission,” said Jessica Lindl, Vice President, Social Impact at Unity. “We’re thrilled that the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Unity path will allow thousands of student learners to take part in game design in an accessible way, setting them up for future career success.”
What you need to support young people with Unity Real-Time 3D
Have downloaded and installed Unity Hub, from where they need to install Unity Editor and Visual Studio Community Edition
For club volunteers who support young people attending Code Clubs and CoderDojos with the new path, we are going to run two free online workshops in February. During the workshops, volunteers will be introduced to the path and the software setup, and we’ll try out Unity together. Keep your eyes on the CoderDojo and Code Club blogs for details!
Club volunteers, if your participants are creating Blender projects, they can import these into Unity too.
Young people can share their Unity creations with the world through Coolest Projects
It’s really exciting for us that we can bring this new project path to young people who dream about creating interactive 3D worlds. We hope to see many of their creations in this year’s Coolest Projects Global, our free online tech showcase for young creators all over the world!
