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In this paper, we describe a programme of school engagement aimed at instilling a discipline of computational thinking within pupils before they embark on a university course. The workshops we deliver are designed mainly to increase the pipeline of school leavers going on to study computer science or software engineering, specifically by changing perceptions on what this means amongst the vast majority -particularly girls -who think it is just a geeky topic for boys.Over the past number of years, student enrolment has been increasing dramatically in our university's undergraduate computer science and software engineering degree programmes. Also, the performance of the students on first-year formal methods modules -which has historically been poor -has risen substantially. Whilst there are many influences contributing towards these trends, we present evidence that our efforts with school engagement has to a non-trivial extent contributed towards these: both through the way the undergraduate programme has been adapted to incorporate the Technocamps approach, and through providing a pipeline of students who understand the principles of computational thinking.

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Dr. Temesghen Kahsai is a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley. His research expertise is in the intersection of formal methods and software engineering, with an emphasis on automated reasoning about software systems. He has extensive experience in the development of formal foundations and tools for the analysis of complex critical systems. He is currently leading three projects on contract-based verification of flight critical systems, analysis of heterogeneous software protocols stacks and credible auto-coding of embedded systems. These projects are funded by NASA and NSF.

Discrete Mathematics is an inevitable part of any undergraduate computer science degree programme. However, computer science students typically find this to be at best a necessary evil with which they struggle to engage. Twenty years ago, we started to address this issue seriously in our university, and we have instituted a number of innovations throughout the years which have had a positive effect on engagement and, thus, attainment. At the turn of the century, a mere 2% of our first-year students attained a 1st-class mark (a mark over 70%) in the discrete mathematics course whilst over half of the class were awarded a failing grade (a mark under 40%). Despite the course syllabus and assessment remaining as difficult as ever (if not more challenging), and despite maintaining the same entrance requirements to the programme whilst more than tripling the class size, for the past two years, two-thirds of the class attained a first-class mark whilst less than 2% of the class failed. In this paper, we describe and motivate the innovations which we introduced, and provide a detailed analysis of how and why attainment levels varied over two decades as a direct result of these innovations.