Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre Archives - Raspberry Pi Foundation https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/tag/raspberry-pi-computing-education-research-centre/ Teach, learn and make with Raspberry Pi Mon, 18 Nov 2024 15:11:19 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.2 https://www.raspberrypi.org/app/uploads/2020/06/cropped-raspberrry_pi_logo-100x100.png Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre Archives - Raspberry Pi Foundation https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/tag/raspberry-pi-computing-education-research-centre/ 32 32 Teaching about AI in schools: Take part in our Research and Educator Community Symposium https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/teaching-about-ai-in-schools-research-and-educator-community-symposium/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/teaching-about-ai-in-schools-research-and-educator-community-symposium/#respond Thu, 31 Oct 2024 10:51:41 +0000 https://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=88786 Worldwide, the use of generative AI systems and related technologies is transforming our lives. From marketing and social media to education and industry, these technologies are being used everywhere, even if it isn’t obvious. Yet, despite the growing availability and use of generative AI tools, governments are still working out how and when to regulate…

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Worldwide, the use of generative AI systems and related technologies is transforming our lives. From marketing and social media to education and industry, these technologies are being used everywhere, even if it isn’t obvious. Yet, despite the growing availability and use of generative AI tools, governments are still working out how and when to regulate such technologies to ensure they don’t cause unforeseen negative consequences.

How, then, do we equip our young people to deal with the opportunities and challenges that they are faced with from generative AI applications and associated systems? Teaching them about AI technologies seems an important first step. But what should we teach, when, and how?

A teacher aids children in the classroom

Researching AI curriculum design

The researchers at the Raspberry Pi Foundation have been looking at research that will help inform curriculum design and resource development to teach about AI in school. As part of this work, a number of research themes have been established, which we would like to explore with educators at a face-to-face symposium. 

These research themes include the SEAME model, a simple way to analyse learning experiences about AI technology, as well as anthropomorphisation and how this might influence the formation of mental models about AI products. These research themes have become the cornerstone of the Experience AI resources we’ve co-developed with Google DeepMind. We will be using these materials to exemplify how the research themes can be used in practice as we review the recently published UNESCO AI competencies.

A group of educators at a workshop.

Most importantly, we will also review how we can help teachers and learners move from a rule-based view of problem solving to a data-driven view, from computational thinking 1.0 to computational thinking 2.0.

A call for teacher input on the AI curriculum

Over ten years ago, teachers in England experienced a large-scale change in what they needed to teach in computing lessons when programming was more formally added to the curriculum. As we enter a similar period of change — this time to introduce teaching about AI technologies — we want to hear from teachers as we collectively start to rethink our subject and curricula. 

We think it is imperative that educators’ voices are heard as we reimagine computer science and add data-driven technologies into an already densely packed learning context. 

Educators at a workshop.

Join our Research and Educator Community Symposium

On Saturday, 1 February 2025, we are running a Research and Educator Community Symposium in collaboration with the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre

In this symposium, we will bring together UK educators and researchers to review research themes, competency frameworks, and early international AI curricula and to reflect on how to advance approaches to teaching about AI. This will be a practical day of collaboration to produce suggested key concepts and pedagogical approaches and highlight research needs. 

Educators and researchers at an event.

This symposium focuses on teaching about AI technologies, so we will not be looking at which AI tools might be used in general teaching and learning or how they may change teacher productivity. 

It is vitally important for young people to learn how to use AI technologies in their daily lives so they can become discerning consumers of AI applications. But how should we teach them? Please help us start to consider the best approach by signing up for our Research and Educator Community Symposium by 9 December 2024.

Information at a glance

When:  Saturday, 1 February 2025 (10am to 5pm) 

Where: Raspberry Pi Foundation Offices, Cambridge

Who: If you have started teaching about AI, are creating related resources, are providing professional development about AI technologies, or if you are planning to do so, please apply to attend our symposium. Travel funding is available for teachers in England.

Please note we expect to be oversubscribed, so book early and tell us about why you are interested in taking part. We will notify all applicants of the outcome of their application by 11 December.

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An update from the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/an-update-from-the-raspberry-pi-computing-education-research-centre/ Wed, 01 May 2024 09:48:26 +0000 https://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=87238 It’s been nearly two years since the launch of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre. Today, the Centre’s Director Dr Sue Sentance shares an update about the Centre’s work. The Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre (RPCERC) is unique for two reasons: we are a joint initiative between the University of Cambridge and the…

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It’s been nearly two years since the launch of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre. Today, the Centre’s Director Dr Sue Sentance shares an update about the Centre’s work.

The Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre (RPCERC) is unique for two reasons: we are a joint initiative between the University of Cambridge and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, with a team that spans both; and we focus exclusively on the teaching and learning of computing to young people, from their early years to the end of formal education.

Educators and researchers mingle at a conference.
At the RPCERC launch in July 2022

We’ve been very busy at the RPCERC since we held our formal launch event in July 2022. We would love everyone who follows the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s work to keep an eye on what we are up to too: you can do that by checking out our website and signing up to our termly newsletter

What does the RPCERC do?

As the name implies, our work is focused on research into computing education and all our research projects align to one of the following themes:

  • AI education
  • Broadening participation in computing
  • Computing around the world
  • Pedagogy and the teaching of computing
  • Physical computing
  • Programming education

These themes encompass substantial research questions, so it’s clear we have a lot to do! We have only been established for a few years, but we’ve made a good start and are grateful to those who have funded additional projects that we are working on.

A student in a computing classroom.

In our work, we endeavour to maintain two key principles that are hugely important to us: sharing our work widely and working collaboratively. We strive to engage in the highest quality rigorous research, and to publish in academic venues. However, we make sure these are available openly for those outside academia. We also favour research that is participatory and collaborative, so we work closely with teachers and other stakeholders. 

Within our six themes we are running a number of projects, and I’ll outline a few of these here.

Exploring physical computing in primary schools

Physical computing is more engaging than simply learning programming and computing skills on screen because children can build interactive and tangible artefacts that exist in the real world. But does this kind of engagement have any lasting impact? Do positive experiences with technology lead to more confidence and creativity later on? These are just some of the questions we aim to answer.

Three young people working on a computing project.

We are delighted to be starting a new longitudinal project investigating the experience of young people who have engaged with the BBC micro:bit and other physical computing devices. We aim to develop insights into changes in attitudes, agency, and creativity at key points as students progress from primary through to secondary education in the UK. 

To do this, we will be following a cohort of children over the course of five years — as they transition from primary school to secondary school — to give us deeper insights into the longer-term impact of working with physical computing than has been possible previously with shorter projects. This longer-term project has been made possible through a generous donation from the Micro:bit Educational Foundation, the BBC, and Nominet. 

Do follow our research to see what we find out!

Generative AI for computing teachers

We are conducting a range of projects in the general area of artificial intelligence (AI), looking both at how to teach and learn AI, and how to learn programming with the help of AI. In our work, we often use the SEAME framework to simplify and categorise aspects of the teaching and learning of AI. However, for many teachers, it’s the use of AI that has generated the most interest for them, both for general productivity and for innovative ways of teaching and learning. 

A group of students and a teacher at the Coding Academy in Telangana.

In one of our AI-related projects, we have been working with a group of computing teachers and the Faculty of Education to develop guidance for schools on how generative AI can be useful in the context of computing teaching. Computing teachers are at the forefront of this potential revolution for school education, so we’ve enjoyed the opportunity to set up this researcher–teacher working group to investigate these issues. We hope to be publishing our guidance in June — again watch this space!

Culturally responsive computing teaching

We’ve carried out a few different projects in the last few years around culturally responsive computing teaching in schools, which to our knowledge are unique for the UK setting. Much of the work on culturally responsive teaching and culturally relevant pedagogy (which stem from different theoretical bases) has been conducted in the USA, and we believe we are the only research team in the UK working on the implications of culturally relevant pedagogy research for computing teaching here. 

Two young people learning together at a laptop.

In one of our studies, we worked with a group of teachers in secondary and primary schools to explore ways in which they could develop and reflect on the meaning of culturally responsive computing teaching in their context. We’ve published on this work, and also produced a technical report describing the whole project. 

In another project, we worked with primary teachers to explore how existing resources could be adapted to be appropriate for their specific context and children. These projects have been funded by Cognizant and Google. 

‘Core’ projects

As well as research that is externally funded, it’s important that we work on more long-term projects that build on our research expertise and where we feel we can make a contribution to the wider community. 

We have four projects that I would put into this category:

  1. Teacher research projects
    This year, we’ve been running a project called Teaching Inquiry in Computing Education, which supports teachers to carry out their own research in the classroom.
  2. Computing around the world
    Following on from our survey of UK and Ireland computing teachers and earlier work on surveying teachers in Africa and globally, we are developing a broader picture of how computing education in school is growing around the world. Watch this space for more details.
  3. PRIMM
    We devised the Predict–Run–Investigate–Modify–Make lesson structure for programming a few years ago and continue to research in this area.
  4. LCT semantic wave theory
    Together with universities in London and Australia, we are exploring ways in which computing education can draw on legitimation code theory (LCT)

We are currently looking for a research associate to lead on one or more of these core projects, so if you’re interested, get in touch. 

Developing new computing education researchers

One of our most important goals is to support new researchers in computing education, and this involves recruiting and training PhD students. During 2022–2023, we welcomed our very first PhD students, Laurie Gale and Salomey Afua Addo, and we will be saying hello to two more in October 2024. PhD students are an integral part of RPCERC, and make a great contribution across the team, as well as focusing on their own particular area of interest in depth. Laurie and Salomey have also been out and about visiting local schools too. 

Laurie’s PhD study focuses on debugging, a key element of programming education. He is looking at lower secondary school students’ attitudes to debugging, their debugging behaviour, and how to teach debugging. If you’d like to take part in Laurie’s research, you can contact us at rpcerc-enquiries@cst.cam.ac.uk.

Salomey’s work is in the area of AI education in K–12 and spans the UK and Ghana. Her first study considered the motivation of teachers in the UK to teach AI and she has spent some weeks in Ghana conducting a case study on the way in which Ghana implemented AI into the curriculum in 2020.

Thanks!

We are very grateful to the Raspberry Pi Foundation for providing a donation which established the RPCERC and has given us financial security for the next few years. We’d also like to express our thanks for other donations and project funding we’ve received from Google, Google DeepMind, the Micro:bit Educational Foundation, BBC, and Nominet. If you would like to work with us, please drop us a line at rpcerc-enquiries@cst.cam.ac.uk.

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Apply for a free UK teacher’s place at the WiPSCE conference https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/free-uk-teacher-places-wipsce-conference-2023/ Mon, 10 Jul 2023 14:08:39 +0000 https://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=84444 From 27 to 29 September 2023, we and the University of Cambridge are hosting the WiPSCE International Workshop on Primary and Secondary Computing Education Research for educators and researchers. This year, this annual conference will take place at Robinson College in Cambridge. We’re inviting all UK-based teachers of computing subjects to apply for one of…

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From 27 to 29 September 2023, we and the University of Cambridge are hosting the WiPSCE International Workshop on Primary and Secondary Computing Education Research for educators and researchers. This year, this annual conference will take place at Robinson College in Cambridge. We’re inviting all UK-based teachers of computing subjects to apply for one of five ‘all expenses paid’ places at this well-regarded annual event.

Educators and researchers mingle at a conference.

You could attend WiPSCE with all expenses paid

WiPSCE is where teachers and researchers discuss research that’s relevant to teaching and learning in primary and secondary computing education, to teacher training, and to related topics. You can find more information about the conference, including the preliminary programme, at wipsce.org

As a teacher at the conference, you will:

  • Engage with high-quality international research in the field where you teach
  • Learn ways to use that research to develop your own classroom practice
  • Find out how to become an advocate in your professional community for research-informed approaches to the teaching of computing.

We are delighted to welcome Google as a sponsor of WiPSCE. Google believes that every student deserves the opportunity to access the benefits of a computing education to help shape their future. However, many students aren’t getting the education they need, and teachers don’t have sufficient resources to provide it. Google recognises the responsibility they have to support organisations, universities, and schools with deep expertise and a commitment to computing education, especially within communities that have been historically underserved.

With support from Google, we will offer free places to five UK computing teachers, covering:

  • The registration fee
  • Two nights’ accommodation at Robinson College
  • Up to £500 supply costs paid to your school to cover your teaching
  • Up to £100 travel costs

To apply, you just need to fill in a short form. The application deadline is Wednesday 19 July.

The application details

To be eligible to apply:

  1. You need to be a currently practising, UK-based teacher of Computing (England), Computing Science (Scotland), ICT or Digital Technologies (N. Ireland), or Computer Science (Wales)
  2. Your headteacher needs to be able to provide written confirmation that they are happy for you to attend WiPSCE
  3. You need to be available to attend the whole conference from Wednesday lunchtime to Friday afternoon
  4. You need to be willing to share what you learn from the conference with your colleagues at school and with your broader teaching community, including through writing an article about your experience and its relevance to your teaching for this blog or Hello World magazine

The application form will ask your for:

  • Your name and contact details
  • Demographic and school information
  • Your teaching experience
  • A statement of up to 500 words on why you’re applying and how you think your teaching practice, your school and your colleagues will benefit from your attendance at WiPSCE (500 words is the maximum, feel free to be concise)

After the 19 July deadline, we’re aiming to inform you of the outcome of your application on Friday 21 July. 

Your application will be reviewed by the 2023 WiPSCE Chairs:

Sue and Mareen will:

  • Use the information you share in your form, particularly in your statement
  • Select applicants from a mix of primary and secondary schools, with a mix of years of computing teaching experience, and from a mix of geographic areas

Join us in strengthening research-informed computing classroom practice

We’d be delighted to receive your application. Being able to facilitate teachers’ attendance at the conference is very much aligned with our approach to research. Both at the Foundation and the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, we’re committed to conducting research that’s directly relevant to schools and teachers, and to working in close collaboration with teachers.

We hope you are interested in attending WiPSCE and becoming an advocate for research-informed computing education practice. If your application is unsuccessful, we hope you consider coming along anyway. We’re looking forward to meeting you there. In the meantime, you can keep up with WiPSCE news on Twitter.

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AI education resources: What do we teach young people? https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/ai-education-resources-what-to-teach-seame-framework/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/ai-education-resources-what-to-teach-seame-framework/#comments Tue, 28 Mar 2023 09:29:49 +0000 https://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=83513 People have many different reasons to think that children and teenagers need to learn about artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Whether it’s that AI impacts young people’s lives today, or that understanding these technologies may open up careers in their future — there is broad agreement that school-level education about AI is important. But how do…

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People have many different reasons to think that children and teenagers need to learn about artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Whether it’s that AI impacts young people’s lives today, or that understanding these technologies may open up careers in their future — there is broad agreement that school-level education about AI is important.

A young person writes Python code.

But how do you actually design lessons about AI, a technical area that is entirely new to young people? That was the question we needed to answer as we started Experience AI, our exciting collaboration with DeepMind, a leading AI company.

Our approach to developing AI education resources

As part of Experience AI, we are creating a free set of lesson resources to help teachers introduce AI and machine learning (ML) to KS3 students (ages 11 to 14). In England this area is not currently part of the national curriculum, but it’s starting to appear in all sorts of learning materials for young people. 

Two learners and a teacher in a physical computing lesson.

While developing the six Experience AI lessons, we took a research-informed approach. We built on insights from the series of research seminars on AI and data science education we had hosted in 2021 and 2022, and on research we ourselves have been conducting at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre.

We reviewed over 500 existing resources that are used to teach AI and ML.

As part of this research, we reviewed over 500 existing resources that are used to teach AI and ML. We found that the vast majority of them were one-off activities, and many claimed to be appropriate for learners of any age. There were very few sets of lessons, or units of work, that were tailored to a specific age group. Activities often had vague learning objectives, or none at all. We rarely found associated assessment activities. These were all shortcomings we wanted to avoid in our set of lessons.

To analyse the content of AI education resources, we use a simple framework called SEAME. This framework is based on work I did in 2018 with Professor Paul Curzon at Queen Mary University of London, running professional development for educators on teaching machine learning.

The SEAME framework gives you a simple way to group learning objectives and resources related to teaching AI and ML, based on whether they focus on social and ethical aspects (SE), applications (A), models (M), or engines (E, i.e. how AI works).
Click to enlarge.

The SEAME framework gives you a simple way to group learning objectives and resources related to teaching AI and ML, based on whether they focus on social and ethical aspects (SE), applications (A), models (M), or engines (E, i.e. how AI works). We hope that it will be a useful tool for anyone who is interested in looking at resources to teach AI. 

What do AI education resources focus on?

The four levels of the SEAME framework do not indicate a hierarchy or sequence. Instead, they offer a way for teachers, resource developers, and researchers to talk about the focus of AI learning activities.

Social and ethical aspects (SE)

The SE level covers activities that relate to the impact of AI on everyday life, and to its implications for society. Learning objectives and their related resources categorised at this level introduce students to issues such as privacy or bias concerns, the impact of AI on employment, misinformation, and the potential benefits of AI applications.

A slide from a lesson about AI that describes an AI application related to timetables.
An example activity in the Experience AI lessons where learners think about the social and ethical issues of an AI application that predicts what subjects they might want to study. This activity is mostly focused on the social and ethical level of the SEAME framework, but also links to the applications and models levels.

Applications (A)

The A level refers to activities related to applications and systems that use AI or ML models. At this level, learners do not learn how to train models themselves, or how such models work. Learning objectives at this level include knowing a range of AI applications and starting to understand the difference between rule-based and data-driven approaches to developing applications.

Models (M)

The M level concerns the models underlying AI and ML applications. Learning objectives at this level include learners understanding the processes used to train and test models. For example, through resources focused on the M level, students could learn about the different learning paradigms of ML (i.e., supervised, unsupervised, or reinforcement learning).

A slide from a lesson about AI that describes an ML model to classify animals.
An example activity in the Experience AI lessons where students learn about classification. This activity is mostly focused on the models level of the SEAME framework, but also links to the social and ethical and the applications levels.

Engines (E)

The E level is related to the engines that make AI models work. This is the most hidden and complex level, and for school-aged learners may need to be taught using unplugged activities and visualisations. Learning objectives could include understanding the basic workings of systems such as data-driven decision trees and artificial neural networks.

Covering the four levels

Some learning activities may focus on a single level, but activities can also span more than one level. For example, an activity may start with learners trying out an existing ‘rock-paper-scissors’ application that uses an ML model to recognise hand shapes. This would cover the applications level. If learners then move on to train the model to improve its accuracy by adding more image data, they work at the models level.

A teacher helps a young person with a coding project.

Other activities cover several SEAME levels to address a specific concept. For example, an activity focussed on bias might start with an example of the societal impact of bias (SE level). Learners could then discuss the AI applications they use and reflect on how bias impacts them personally (A level). The activity could finish with learners exploring related data in a simple ML model and thinking about how representative the data is of all potential application users (M level).

The set of lessons on AI we are developing in collaboration with DeepMind covers all four levels of SEAME.

The set of Experience AI lessons we are developing in collaboration with DeepMind covers all four levels of SEAME. The lessons are based on carefully designed learning objectives and specifically targeted to KS3 students. Lesson materials include presentations, videos, student activities, and assessment questions.

The SEAME framework as a tool for research on AI education

For researchers, we think the SEAME framework will, for example, be useful to analyse school curriculum material to see whether some age groups have more learning activities available at one level than another, and whether this changes over time. We may find that primary school learners work mostly at the SE and A levels, and secondary school learners move between the levels with increasing clarity as they develop their knowledge. It may also be the case that some learners or teachers prefer activities focused on one level rather than another. However, we can’t be sure: research is needed to investigate the teaching and learning of AI and ML across all year groups.

That’s why we’re excited to welcome Salomey Afua Addo to the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre. Salomey joined the Centre as a PhD student in January, and her research will focus on approaches to the teaching and learning of AI. We’re looking forward to seeing the results of her work.

If you’d like to get involved with Experience AI as an educator and use our lessons with your class, you can start by visiting us at experience-ai.org.

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Join us at the launch event of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-computing-education-research-centre-launch-event-invitation/ Wed, 01 Jun 2022 08:28:42 +0000 https://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=79822 Last summer, the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology created a new research centre focusing on computing education research for young people in both formal and non-formal education. The Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre is an exciting venture through which we aim to deliver a step-change…

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Last summer, the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology created a new research centre focusing on computing education research for young people in both formal and non-formal education. The Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre is an exciting venture through which we aim to deliver a step-change for the field.

school-aged girls and a teacher using a computer together.

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.

Young learners at computers in a classroom.

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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Implementing culturally responsive computing teaching in schools in England https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/culturally-responsive-computing-teaching-schools-england-roots-research-project/ Thu, 27 Jan 2022 09:52:09 +0000 https://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=78080 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, bridging our research team here at…

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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, 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
  • Exploring issues of social justice and bias

The story so far

The overall objective of our work in this area is to further our understanding of ways to engage underrepresented groups in computing. In 2021, funded by a Special Projects Grant from ACM’s Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), we established a working group of teachers and academics who met up over the course of three months to explore and discuss culturally relevant pedagogy. The result was a collaboratively written set of practical guidelines about culturally relevant and responsive teaching for classroom educators.

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 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

In our new 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 this 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. 

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.

You can download your copy of the proceedings of the equity, diversity, and inclusion series now.  

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Introducing the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-computing-education-research-centre-university-of-cambridge/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-computing-education-research-centre-university-of-cambridge/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2021 09:30:08 +0000 https://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=72885 I am delighted to announce the creation of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. 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…

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I am delighted to announce the creation of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.

University of Cambridge logo

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.

Woman computing teacher and young female student at a laptop.
The Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre will work with educators to translate its research into practice and effect positive change in learners’ lives.

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.

Two teenagers sit at laptops in a computing classroom.
We need research to find the best ways of teaching young people how computers work and how to create with them.

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.

Woman computing teacher and female students at a computer.
Computers and digital technologies shape our lives and society — how do we make sure young people have the skills to use them to solve problems?

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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