Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 03 | Page 92

/////////////////////////////////////////// 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 92 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