Across Wales-as, but even more so than, elsewhere-there is a critical shortage of teachers who are qualified to teach Computer Science. This issue is particularly coming to the fore now due to ongoing changes to the national school curriculum which is seeing a rigorous computer science curriculum replacing the ICT curriculum which has been passed off as computing in most schools over the past several decades. In this paper we describe the efforts made by Technocamps to tackle this problem by encouraging computer science graduates to consider education as a viable career option. In particular, we outline a credit-bearing module which incorporates an extensive school placement. We discuss the challenges with setting up and running such a module as well as its effectiveness.
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.
Intensive curriculum reform is currently being undertaken in Wales across all school years and all subjects. However, political, geographical and socio-cultural issues have to date hindered any substantive educational policy or curriculum reform for computer science, due ultimately to the marked lack of teachers who are qualified and/or confident to teach the subject. In this paper we describe Technoteach, a University-based model for supporting prospective computer science teachers and thus drive the delivery of the evolving computer science curriculum across Wales. We argue its need, justify its methodology, and detail its impact.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.