Computing education research that focuses specifically on young people is relatively new, particularly in contrast to established research disciplines such as those focused on mathematics or science education. However, computing is now a mandatory part of the curriculum in several countries, and being taken up in education globally, so we need to rigorously investigate the learning and teaching of this subject, and do so in conjunction with schools and teachers.

You’re invited to our in-person launch event

To celebrate the official launch of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, we will be holding an in-person event in Cambridge, UK on Weds 20 July from 15.00. This event is free and open to all: if you are interested in computing education research, we invite you to register for a ticket to attend. By coming together in person, we want to help strengthen a collaborative community of researchers, teachers, and other education practitioners.

The launch event is your opportunity to meet and mingle with members of the Centre’s research team and listen to a series of short talks. We are delighted that Prof. Mark Guzdial (University of Michigan), who many readers will be familiar with, will be travelling from the US to join us in cutting the ribbon. Mark has worked in computer science education for decades and won many awards for his research, so I can’t think of anybody better to be our guest speaker. Our other speakers are Prof. Alastair Beresford from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, and Carrie Anne Philbin MBE, our Director of Educator Support at the Foundation.

The event will take place at the Department of Computer Science and Technology in Cambridge. It will start at 15.00 with a reception where you’ll have the chance to talk to researchers and see the work we’ve been doing. We will then hear from our speakers, before wrapping up at 17.30. You can find more details about the event location on the ticket registration page.

Our research at the Centre

The aim of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre is to increase our understanding of teaching and learning computing, computer science, and associated subjects, with a particular focus on young people who are from backgrounds that are traditionally under-represented in the field of computing or who experience educational disadvantage.

We have been establishing the Centre over the last nine months. In October, I was appointed Director, and in December, we were awarded funding by Google for a one-year research project on culturally relevant computing teaching, following on from a project at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The Centre’s research team is uniquely positioned, straddling both the University and the Foundation. Our two organisations complement each other very well: the University is one of the highest-ranking universities in the world and renowned for its leading-edge academic research, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation works with schools, educators, and learners globally to pursue its mission to put the power of computing into the hands of young people.

In our research at the Centre, we will make sure that:

1. We collaborate closely with teachers and schools when implementing and evaluating research projects
2. We publish research results in a number of different formats, as promptly as we can and without a paywall
3. We translate research findings into practice across the Foundation’s extensive programmes and with our partners

We are excited to work with a large community of teachers and researchers, and we look forward to meeting you at the launch event.

Stay up to date

At the end of June, we’ll be launching a new website for the Centre at computingeducationresearch.org. This will be the place for you to find out more about our projects and events, and to sign up to our newsletter. For announcements on social media, follow the Raspberry Pi Foundation on Twitter or Linkedin.

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With computers and digital technologies increasingly shaping all of our lives, it’s more important than ever that every young person, whatever their background or circumstances, has meaningful opportunities to learn about how computers work and how to create with them. That’s our mission at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Why research matters

Compared to subjects like mathematics, computing is a relatively new field and, while there are enduring principles and concepts, it’s a subject that’s changing all the time as the pace of innovation accelerates. If we’re honest, we just don’t know enough about what works in computing education, and there isn’t nearly enough investment in high-quality research.

That’s why research and evidence has always been a priority for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, from rigorously evaluating our own programmes and running structured experiments to test what works in areas like gender balance in computing, to providing a platform for the world’s best computing education researchers to share their findings through our seminar series. 

Through our research activities we hope to make a contribution to the field of computing education and, as an operating foundation working with tens of thousands of educators and millions of learners every year, we’re uniquely well-placed to translate that research into practice. You can read more about our research work here.

The Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre 

The new Research Centre is a joint initiative between the University of Cambridge and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and builds on our longstanding partnership with the Department of Computer Science and Technology. That partnership goes all the way back to 2008, to the creation of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the invention of the Raspberry Pi computer. More recently, we have collaborated on Isaac Computer Science, an online platform that is already being used by more than 2500 teachers and 36,000 students of A level Computer Science in England, and that we will shortly expand to cover GCSE content.

Through the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, we want to increase understanding of what works in teaching and learning computing, with a particular focus on young people who come from backgrounds that are traditionally underrepresented in the field of computing or who experience educational disadvantage.

The Research Centre will combine expertise from both institutions, undertaking rigorous original research and working directly with teachers and other educators to translate that research into practice and effect positive change in young peoples’ lives.

The scope will be computing education — the teaching and learning of computing, computer science, digital making, and wider digital skills — for school-aged young people in primary and secondary education, colleges, and non-formal settings.

We’re starting with three broad themes: 

• Computing curricula, pedagogy, and assessment, including teacher professional development and the learning and teaching process
  
• The role of non-formal learning in computing and digital making learning, including self-directed learning and extra-curricular programmes
  
• Understanding and removing the barriers to computing education, including the factors that stand in the way of young people’s engagement and progression in computing education

While we’re based in the UK and expect to run a number of research projects here, we are eager to establish collaborations with universities and researchers in other countries, including the USA and India. 

Get involved

We’re really excited about this next chapter in our research work, and doubly excited to be working with the brilliant team at the Department of Computer Science and Technology. 

If you’d like to find out more or get involved in supporting the new Computing Education Research Centre, please subscribe to our research newsletter or email research@raspberrypi.org.

You can also join our free monthly research seminars.

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Thanks to our contract with England’s Department for Education which is funding our work as part of the National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE) consortium, we’ve been able to collaborate with the University of Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology to build the Isaac Computer Science platform, and to create an events programme, for A level students and teachers. Now we will use this existing funding to also provide content and events for learning and teaching GCSE computer science.

Building on our success

With content designed by our expert team of computer science teachers and researchers, the Isaac Computer Science platform is already being used by 2000 teachers and 18,000 students at A level. The platform houses a rich set of interactive study materials and reflective questions, providing full coverage of exam specifications. 

Within the Teach Computing Curriculum we built as part of our NCCE work, we’ve already created free classroom resources to support teachers with the delivery of GCSE computer science (as well as the rest of the English computing curriculum from Key Stages 1 to 4). Expanding the Isaac Computer Science platform to offer interactive learning content to GCSE students, and running events specifically for GCSE students, will perfectly complement the Teach Computing Curriculum and support learners to continue their computing education beyond GCSE.

We’ll use our tried and tested process of content design, implementation of student and teacher feedback, and continual improvements based on evidence from platform usage data, to produce an educational offering for GCSE computer science that is of the highest quality.

What will Isaac Computer Science GCSE cover?

Isaac Computer Science GCSE will support students and teachers of GCSE computer science across the OCR, AQA, Pearson Edexcel, Eduqas, and WJEC exam bodies, covering the whole of the national curriculum. The content will be aimed at ages 14 to 16, and it will be suitable for students of all experience levels and backgrounds — from those who have studied little computer science at Key Stage 3 and are simply interested, to those who are already set to pursue a career related to computer science.

Benefits for students and teachers

Students will be able to:

• Use the platform for structured, self-paced study and progress tracking
• Prepare for their GCSE examinations according to their exam body
• Get instant feedback from the interactive questions to guide further study
• Explore areas of interest more deeply

Teachers will be able to:

• Use the content and examples on the platform as the basis for classroom work
• Direct their students to topics to read as homework
• Set self-marking questions as homework or in the classroom as formative assessment to identify areas where additional support is required and track students’ progress

Free events for learning, training, and inspiration

As part of Isaac Computer Science GCSE, we’ll also organise an events programme for GCSE students to get support with specific topics, as well as inspiration about opportunities to continue their computer science education beyond GCSE into A level and higher education or employment.

For teachers, we’ll continue to provide a wide spectrum of free CPD training events and courses through the National Centre for Computing Education.

Accessible all over the world

As is the case for the Isaac Computer Science A level content, we’ll create content for this project to suit the English national curriculum and exam bodies. However, anyone anywhere in the world will be able to access and use the platform for free. The content will be published under an Open Government License v3.0.

When does Isaac Computer Science GCSE launch, and can I get involved now?

Our launch will be in January of 2022, with the full suite of content available by September of 2022.

We’ll be putting out calls to the teaching community in England, asking for your help to guide the design and quality assurance of the Isaac Computer Science GCSE materials.

Follow Isaac Computer Science on social media and sign up on the Isaac Computer Science platform to be the first to hear news!

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That’s why at the Raspberry Pi Foundation we have made research a key part of our new strategy, and that’s why we worked with the University of Cambridge to hold this event.

Moving the symposium online

This was to be our first large-scale research event, held jointly with the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology. Of course, current circumstances made it necessary for us to turn the symposium from a face-to-face into an online event at short notice.

An enthusiastic team took on the challenge, and we were delighted with how well the way the day went! You can see what participants shared throughout the day on Twitter.

Keynote presentation

Our keynote speaker was Dr Natalie Rusk of MIT and the Scratch Foundation, who shared her passion for digital creativity using Scratch.

We were excited to see images from early versions of Scratch and how it had developed over the years. Plus, Natalie revealed the cat blocks that were available on 1 April only — I had completely forgotten the day of the symposium was April Fools’ Day! The focus of Natalie’s presentation was on creativity, invention, tinkering, and the development of ideas over time, and she explored case studies of two ‘Scratchers’ who took a very different approach to working in the Scratch community on projects. The talk was well received by all.

Paper presentations

We heard from researchers from a range of institutions on topics under these themes:

• Working with teachers on computing education research
• Assessment tools and techniques
• Perceptions and attitudes about computing
• Theoretical frameworks used for computing education

Highlights for me were Ethel Tshukudu’s analysis of the way students transfer from one programming language to another, in which she draws on semantic transfer theory; and Paul Curzon’s application of Karl Maton’s semantic wave theory (taken from linguistics) to computing education.

The symposium’s focus was computing for young people, and much of the research presented was directly grounded in work with teachers and students in learning situations. Lynne Blair shared an interesting study highlighting female participation in A level computer science classes, which found the feeling of a lack of belonging among young women, a finding that echoes existing research around computing education and gender. Fenia Aivaloglou from the University of Leiden, Netherlands, considered the barriers faced by learners and teachers in extra-curricular code clubs, and Alison Twiner and Jo Shillingworth from the University of Cambridge shared a study on engaging young people in work-related computing projects.

We also heard how tools for supporting learners are developing, for example machine learning techniques to process natural language answers to questions on the free online learning platforms Isaac Computer Science and Isaac Physics.

Poster presentations

For the poster sessions, we divided into separate sessions so that the poster presenters could display and discuss their posters with a smaller group of people. This enabled more in-depth discussion about the topic being presented, which participants appreciated at this large online event. The 11 posters covered a wide range of topics from data visualisations in robotics to data-driven dance.

We showcased some of our own work on progression mapping with learning graphs for the NCCE Resource Repository; the Isaac Computer Science A level content platform; and our research into online learning with our free online courses for teachers.

Running an online symposium — what is it like?

From having successfully hosted this event online, we learned many lessons that we want to put into practice in future online events being offered by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

There’s a plethora of tools available, and they all have their pros and cons (we used Google Meet). It’s my view that the tool is less important than the preparation needed for a large-scale online event, which is significant! The organising team hosted technical run-throughs with all presenters in the two days before the event, and instigated a ‘green room’ for all presenters to check their setups again five to ten minutes before their speaking slot. This helped to avoid a whole myriad of potential technical difficulties.

I’m so grateful to the great team at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, who worked behind the scenes all day to make sure that the participants and presenters got the most out of the event!

Stay in touch!

• On the Research Symposium web page, you can now download the symposium’s abstract booklet. We will shortly be sharing recordings of the symposium’s presentations and files of slides and posters there as well.
• When we moved the symposium online, we postponed two pre-symposium events: a workshop on gender balance, and a workshop on research-to-practice; we’re hoping to hold these as in-person events in the autumn.
• Meanwhile, we are planning a series of online seminars, set to start on Tuesday 5 May at 17:00 BST and continue throughout the summer at two-week intervals.

If you’re interested in receiving a regular update about these and other research activities of ours, sign up to our newsletter.

We look forward to building a community of researchers and to sharing more of our work with you over the coming years.

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The project is a collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the University of Cambridge, and is funded by the Department for Education’s National Centre for Computing Education programme.

Isaac Computer Science

Isaac Computer Science gives you access to a huge range of online learning materials for the classroom, homework, and revision — all for free.

The platform’s resources are mapped to the A level specifications in England (including the AQA and OCR exam boards). You’ll be able to set assignments for your students, have the platform mark it for you, and be confident that the content is relevant and high quality. We are confident that this will save you time in planning lessons and setting homework.

“Computer Science is a relatively small subject area and teachers across the country often work alone without the support of colleagues. Isaac Computer Science will build a teaching and learning community to support teachers at all levels and will offer invaluable support to A level students in their learning journey. As an experienced teacher, I am very excited to have the opportunity to work on this project.”
– Diane Dowling, Isaac Computer Science Learning Manager and former teacher

And that’s not all! To further support you, we are also running free student workshops and teacher CPD events at universities and schools around England. Tickets for the events are available to book through the Isaac Computer Science website.

“Isaac Computer Science helped equip me with the skills to teach A level, and ran a great workshop at one of their recent Discovery events using the micro:bit and the Kitronik :MOVE mini. This is a session that I’ll definitely be using again and again.”
 – James Spencer, Computer Science teacher at St Martin’s School

A teacher works with her students at our recent Discovery event in Cambridge.

Why sign up?

Isaac Computer Science provides:

• High-quality materials written by experienced teachers
• Resources mapped to the AQA and OCR specifications
• CPD events for teachers
• Workshops for students

Isaac Computer Science allows you to:

• Plan lessons around high-quality content pages, thus saving time
• Select and set self-marking homework questions
• Pinpoint areas to work on with your students
• Manage students’ progress in your personal markbook

Start using Isaac Computer Science today:

• Sign up at isaaccomputerscience.org
• Request a teacher account and register your students
• Start using the platform in your classroom!

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