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INDUSTRY WATCH
Professor Edmund Burke, Vice-Principal for
Science and Engineering at Queen Mary,
said: “The Institute of Coding will draw upon
expertise beyond science and engineering to
represent a truly interdisciplinary initiative.
Another strength lies in the partnership
between business and academia which
should lead to a wide range of opportunities
to help prepare our students for today’s
digital workplace.”
As well as improving the employability of
computer scientists to plug the digital skills
gap, the institute aims to bring more people
from under-represented groups into the
tech sector. Its work is centred around five
core themes:
University learners (led by the
Open University) – To boost
graduate employability through a new
industry standard targeted at degree
level qualifications.
The digital workforce (led by Aston
University) – To develop specialist skills
training in areas of strategic importance.
Digitalising the professions (led by
Coventry University) – To transform
professions undergoing digital transformation,
for example, helping learners retrain via new
digital training programmes provided through
online and face-to-face learning.
Widening participation (led by Queen
Mary) – To boost equality and diversity
in technology-related education and
careers by delivering, for example, tailored
workshops, bootcamps, innovative learning
facilities and other outreach activities. In
2017, female programmers and software
developers made up just 3.9% of tech and
telecommunications professionals in the UK.
Knowledge sharing and sustainability
(led by the University of Bath) – To share
outcomes and good practice, ensuring
long-term sustainability of the IoC. This
will include building up an evidence base
of research, analysis and intelligence to
anticipate future skills.
The institute will also work with outreach and
community groups, schools and FE colleges
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INTELLIGENTCIO
to encourage a larger number of currently
under-represented groups into digital
education. One early focus will be to increase
the number of women choosing to work in
the digital sector and on support for those
returning to work.
Giving students the confidence to make
mistakes when they are learning to write
computer code could enable them to become
more successful coders, research from
Goldsmiths, University of London suggests.
The research was presented by Dr Matthew
Yee-King at the recent IEEE Global
Engineering Conference (Educon 2017)
in Athens, Greece. The work builds on the
STEAM (Science Technology Engineering
Arts Mathematics) approach to research and
teaching, which brings methods and practices
from the arts, humanities and social sciences
into science and engineering subjects.
Mark d’Inverno, Professor of Computer
Science, said: “We’ve been able to build a
system that makes programming feel like
art. If you are composing at the piano you
get immediate feedback and so the pianist
can keep trying different things until they
hit upon what they want. You learn to feel
happy to fail and by failing you develop a
greater idea of what you want to do.
“In addition, you develop your
awareness so you can spot when you’ve
come across something that works. We
wanted a coding environment that created
a learning experience that was more like this;
more like a sculptor chipping away at a
piece of stone or a painter painting on a
canvas where there is a very tightly-coupled
loop of trying something out and then
getting immediate sensory feedback on
it. With more traditional programming
language environments you code and then
hit ‘compile’ and only if that works you
then hit ‘run’. There is no sense of
‘sculpting code’.
“The system – and the way we teach – also
inspires our students to have a stronger
sense of an overarching artistic or aesthetic
goal rather than solely an engineering one
which is typical of traditional approaches to
learning to program.”
To see how a STEAM approach, compared
to traditional learning methods, works,
the team from the Department of
Computing studied the coding progress of
11 undergraduate students. The students
participated in six two-hour STEAM
lessons and six two-hour non-STEAM
lessons over the course of a two-week
summer school. The lessons were all
based around learning to manipulate
audio and graphics using Javascript.
Unlike traditional teaching methods used
in computer science, STEAM lessons were
open-ended: giving students a concept
such as ‘timbre’ or ‘motion’ around
which to develop an idea for a simple
programme or asking them to select part
of another student’s code to customise.
The team used CodeCircle, a new
programming environment they are
developing within a HEFCE-funded
www.intelligentcio.com