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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We heard from an international team (Monica McGill , USA; Rebecca Vivian, Australia; Elizabeth Cole, Scotland) who represented a group of researchers also based in England, Malta, Ireland, and Italy. As a researcher working at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, I myself was part of this research group. The group developed METRECC, a comprehensive and validated survey tool that can be used to benchmark and measure developments of the teaching and learning of computing in formal education systems around the world. Monica, Rebecca, and Elizabeth presented how the research group developed and validated the METRECC tool, and shared some findings from their pilot study.

What’s in a curriculum? Developing a survey tool

Those of us who work or have worked in school education use the word ‘curriculum’ frequently, although it’s an example of education terminology that means different things in different contexts, and to different people. Following Porter and Smithson (2001)¹, we can distinguish between the intended curriculum and the enacted curriculum:

• Intended curriculum: Policy tools as curriculum standards, frameworks, or guidelines that outline the curriculum teachers are expected to deliver.
• Enacted curriculum: Actual curricular content in which students engage in the classroom, and adopted pedagogical approaches; for computer science (CS) curricula, this also includes students’ use of technology, physical computing devices, and tools in CS lessons.

To compare the intended and enacted computing curriculum in as many countries as possible, at particular points in time, the research group Monica, Rebecca, Elizabeth, and I were part of developed the METRECC survey tool.

METRECC stands for MEasuring TeacheREnacted Computing Curriculum. The METRECC survey has 11 categories of questions and is designed to be completed by computing teachers within 35–40 minutes. Following best practice in research, which calls for standardised research instruments, the research group ensured that the survey produces valid, reliable results (meaning that it works as intended) before using it to gather data.

Using METRECC in a pilot study

In their pilot study, the research group gathered data from 7 countries. The intended curriculum for each country was determined by examining standards and policies in place for each country/state under consideration. Teachers’ answers in the METRECC survey provided the countries’ enacted curricula. (The complete dataset from the pilot study is publicly available at csedresearch.org, a very useful site for CS education researchers where many surveys are shared.)

The researchers then mapped the intended to the enacted curricula to find out whether teachers were actually teaching the topics that were prescribed for them. Overall, the results of the mapping showed that there was a good match between intended and enacted curricula. Examples of mismatches include lower numbers of primary school teachers reporting that they taught visual or symbolic programming, even though the topic did appear on their curriculum.

Another aspect of the METRECC survey allows to measure teachers’ confidence, self-efficacy, and self-esteem. The results of the pilot study showed a relationship between years of experience and CS self-esteem; in particular, after four years of teaching, teachers started to report high self-esteem in relation to computer science. Moreover, primary teachers reported significantly lower self-esteem than secondary teachers did, and female teachers reported lower self-esteem than male teachers did.

Adapting the survey’s language

The METRECC survey has also been used in South Asia, namely Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka (where computing is taught under ICT). Amongst other things, what the researchers learned from that study was that some of the survey questions needed to be adapted to be relevant to these countries. For example, while in the UK we use the word ‘gifted’ to mean ‘high-attaining’, in the South Asian countries involved in the study, to be ‘gifted’ means having special needs.

The study highlighted how important it is to ensure that surveys intended for an international audience use terminology and references that are pertinent to many countries, or that the survey language is adapted in order to make sense in each context it is delivered. 

Let’s keep this monitoring of computing education moving forward!

The seminar presentation was well received, and because we now hold our seminars for 90 minutes instead of an hour, we had more time for questions and answers.

My three main take-aways from the seminar were:

1. International collaboration is key

It is very valuable to be able to form international working groups of researchers collaborating on a common project; we have so much to learn from each other. Our Raspberry Pi research seminars attract educators and researchers from many different parts of the world, and we can truly push the field’s understanding forward when we listen to experiences and lessons of people from diverse contexts and cultures.

2. Making research data publicly available

Increasingly, it is expected that research datasets are made available in publicly accessible repositories. While this is becoming the norm in healthcare and scientific, it’s not yet as prevalent in computing education research. It was great to be able to publicly share the dataset from the METRECC pilot study, and we encourage other researchers in this field to do the same. 

3. Extending the global scope of this research

Finally, this work is only just beginning. Over the last decade, there has been an increasing move towards teaching aspects of computer science in school in many countries around the world, and being able to measure change and progress is important. Only a handful of countries were involved in the pilot study, and it would be great to see this research extend to more countries, with larger numbers of teachers involved, so that we can really understand the global picture of formal computing education. Budding research students, take heed!

If you missed the seminar, you can find the presentation slides and a recording of the researchers’ talk on our seminars page.

Next up in our seminar series

In our next seminar on Tuesday 6 October at 17:00–18:30 BST / 12:00–13:30 EDT / 9:00–10:30 PT / 18:00–19:30 CEST, we’ll welcome Shuchi Grover, a prominent researcher in the area of computational thinking and formative assessment. The title of Shuchi’s seminar is Assessments to improve student learning in introductory CS classrooms. To join, simply sign up with your name and email address.

Once you’ve signed up, we’ll email you the seminar meeting link and instructions for joining. If you attended this past seminar, the link remains the same.

1. Andrew C. Porter and John L. Smithson. 2001. Defining, Developing and Using Curriculum Indicators. CPRE Research Reports, 12-2001. (2001)

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“In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.” – Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas, 1980

We owe much of what we have learned about children learning to program to Seymour Papert (1928–2016), who not only was a great mathematician and computer scientist, but also an inspirational educationalist. He developed the theoretical approach to learning we now know as constructionism, which purports that learning takes place through building artefacts that have meaning and can be shared with others. Papert, together with others, developed the Logo programming language in 1967 to help children develop concepts in both mathematics and in programming. He believed that programming could give children tangible and concrete experiences to support their acquisition of mathematical concepts. Educational programming languages such as Logo were widely used in both primary and secondary education settings during the 1980s and 90s. Thus for many years the links between mathematics and programming have been evident, and we were very fortunate to be able to explore this topic with our research seminar guest speaker, Professor Dame Celia Hoyles of University College London.

Professor Dame Celia Hoyles

Dame Celia Hoyles is a huge celebrity in the world of mathematical education and programming. As well as authoring literally hundreds of academic papers on mathematics education, including on Logo programming, she has received a number of prestigious awards and honours, and has served as the Chief Advisor to the UK government on mathematics in school. For all these reasons, we were delighted to hear her present at a Raspberry Pi Foundation computing education research seminar.

Mathematics is a subject we all need to understand the basics of — it underpins much of our other learning and empowers us in daily life. Yet some mathematical concepts can seem abstract and teachers have struggled over the years to help children to understand them. Since programming includes the design, building, and debugging of artefacts, it is a great approach for make such abstract concepts come to life. It also enables the development of both computational and mathematical thinking, as Celia described in her talk.

Learning mathematics through Scratch programming

Celia and a team* at University College London developed a curriculum initiative called ScratchMaths to teach carefully selected mathematical concepts through programming (funded by the Education Endowment Foundation in 2014–2018). ScratchMaths is for use in upper primary school (age 9–11) over a two-year period.

In the first year, pupils take three computational thinking modules, and in the second year, they move to three more mathematical thinking modules. All the ScratchMaths materials were designed around a pedagogical framework called the 5Es: explore, envisage, explain, exchange, and bridge. This enables teachers to understand the structure and sequencing of the materials as they use them in the classroom:

• Explore: Investigate, try things out yourself, debug in reaction to feedback
• Envisage: Have a goal in mind, predict outcome of program before trying
• Explain: Explain what you have done, articulate reasons behind your approach to others
• Exchange: Collaborate & share, try to see a problem from another’s perspective as well as defend your own approach and compare with others
• bridgE: Make explicit links to the mathematics curriculum

Teachers in the ScratchMaths project participated in professional development (two days per module) to enable them to understand the materials and the pedagogical approach.

At the end of the project, external evaluators measured the childrens’ learning and found a statistically significant increase in computational thinking skills after the first year, but no difference between an intervention group and a control group in the mathematical thinking outcomes in the second year (as measured by the national mathematics tests at that age).

Celia discussed a number of reasons for these findings. She also drew out the positive perspective that children in the trial learned two subjects at the same time without any detriment to their learning of mathematics. Covering two subjects and drawing the links between them without detriment to the core learning is potentially a benefit to schools who need to fit many subjects into their teaching day.

Much more information about the programme and the materials, which are freely available for use, can be found on the ScratchMaths project’s website, and you can also read a research paper describing the project.

As at all our research seminars, participants had many questions for our speaker. Although the project was designed for primary education, where it’s more common to learn subjects together across the curriculum, several questions revolved around the project’s suitability for secondary school. It’s interesting to reflect on how a programme like ScratchMaths might work at secondary level.

Should computing be taught in conjunction or separately?

Teaching programming through mathematics, or vice versa, is established practice in some countries. One example comes from Sweden, where computing and programming is taught across different subject areas, including mathematics: “through teaching pupils should be given opportunities to develop knowledge in using digital tools and programming to explore problems and mathematical concepts, make calculations and to present and interpret data”. In England, conversely, we have a discrete computing curriculum, and an educational system that separates subjects out so that it is often difficult for children to see overlap and contiguity. However, having the focus on computing as a discrete subject gives enormous benefits too, as Celia outlined at the beginning of her talk, and it opens up the potential to give children an in-depth understanding of the whole subject area over their school careers. In an ideal world, perhaps we would teach programming in conjunction with a range of subjects, thus providing the concrete realisation of abstract concepts, while also having discrete computing and computer science in the curriculum.

In our current context of a global pandemic, we are continually seeing the importance of computing applications, for example computer modelling and simulation used in the analysis of data. This talk highlighted the importance of learning computing per se, as well as the mathematics one can learn through integrating these two subjects.

Celia is a member of the National Centre of Computing Education (NCCE) Academic Board, made up of academics and experts who support the teaching and learning elements of the NCCE, and we enjoy our continued work with her in this capacity. Through the NCCE, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is reaching thousands of children and educators with free computing resources, online courses, and advanced-level computer science materials. Our networks of Code Clubs and CoderDojos also give children the space and freedom to experiment and play with programming and digital making in a way that is concordant with a constructionist approach.

Next up in our seminar series

If you missed the seminar, you can find Celia’s presentation slides and a recording of her talk on our research seminars page.

In our next seminar on Tuesday 16 June at 17:00–18:00 BST / 12:00–13:00 EDT / 9:00–10:00 PDT / 18:00–19:00 CEST, we’ll welcome Jane Waite, Teaching Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Jane will be sharing insights about Semantic Waves and unplugged computing. To join the seminar, simply sign up with your name and email address and we’ll email you the link and instructions. If you attended Celia’s seminar, the link remains the same.

*The ScratchMaths team are :

• Professor Dame Celia Hoyles (Mathematics) & Professor Richard Noss (Mathematics) UCL Knowledge Lab
• Professor Ivan Kalas, (Computing) Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
• Dr Laura Benton (Computing) & Piers Saunders, (Mathematics) UCL Knowledge Lab
• Professor Dave Pratt (Mathematics) UCL Institute of Education

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Research into online learning and remote teaching

At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we are hosting a free online seminar every second Tuesday to explore a wide variety of topics in the area of digital and computing education. Last Tuesday we were delighted to welcome Dr Lauren Margulieux, Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences at Georgia State University, USA. She shared her findings about different remote teaching approaches and practical tips for educators in the current crisis.

Lauren’s research interests are in educational technology and online learning, particularly for computing education. She focuses on designing instructions in a way that supports online students who do not necessarily have immediate access to a teacher or instructor to ask questions or overcome problem-solving impasses.

A vocabulary for online and blended learning

In non-pandemic situations, online instruction comes in many forms to serve many purposes, both in higher education and in K-12 (primary and secondary school). Much research has been carried out in how online learning can be used for successful learning outcomes, and in particular, how it can be blended with face-to-face (hybrid learning) to maximise the impact of both contexts.

In her seminar talk, Lauren helped us to understand the different ways in which online learning can take place, by sharing with us vocabulary to better describe different ways of learning with and through technology.

Lauren presented a taxonomy for classifying types of online and blended teaching and learning in two dimensions (shown in the image below). These are delivery type (technology or instructor), and whether content is received by learners, or actually being applied in the learning experience.

In Lauren’s words: “The taxonomy represents the four things that we control as instructors. We can’t control whether our students talk to each other or email each other, or ask each other questions […], therefore this taxonomy gives us a tool for defining how we design our classes.”

This taxonomy illustrates that there are a number of different ways in which the four types of instruction — instructor-transmitted, instructor-mediated, technology-transmitted, and technology-mediated — can be combined in a learning experience that uses both online and face-to-face elements.

Using her taxonomy in an examination (meta-analysis) of 49 studies relating to computer science teaching in higher education, Lauren found a range of different ways of mixing instruction, which are shown in the graph below.

• Lecture hybrid means that the teaching is all delivered by the teacher, partly face-to-face and partly online.
• Practice hybrid means that the learning is done through application of content and receiving feedback, which happens partly face-to-face or synchronously and partly online or asynchronously.
• Replacement blend refers to instruction where lecture and practice takes place in a classroom and part of both is replaced with an online element.
• Flipped blend instruction is where the content is transmitted through the use of technology, and the application of the learning is supported through an instructor. Again, the latter element can also take place online, but it is synchronous rather than asynchronous — as is the case in our current context.
• Supplemental blend learning refers to instruction where content is delivered face-to-face, and then practice and application of content, together with feedback, takes place online — basically the opposite of the flipped blend approach.

Lauren’s examination found that the flipped blend approach was most likely to demonstrate improved learning outcomes. This is a useful finding for the many schools (and universities) that are experimenting with a range of different approaches to remote teaching.

Another finding of Lauren’s study was that approaches that involve the giving of feedback promoted improved learning. This has also been found in studies of assessment for learning, most notably by Black and Wiliam. As Lauren pointed out, the implication is that the reason blended and flipped learning approaches are the most impactful is that they include face-to-face or synchronous time for the educator to discuss learning with the students, including giving feedback.

Lauren’s tips for remote teaching

Of course we currently find ourselves in the midst of school closures across the world, so our only option in these circumstances is to teach online. In her seminar talk, Lauren also included some tips from her own experience to help educators trying to support their students during the current crisis:

• Align learning objectives, instruction, activities, assignments, and assessments.
• Use good equipment: headphones to avoid echo and a good microphone to improve clarity and reduce background noise.
• Be consistent in disseminating information, as there is a higher barrier to asking questions.
• Highlight important points verbally and visually.
• Create ways for students to talk with each other, through discussions, breakout rooms, opportunities to talk when you aren’t present, etc.
• Use video when possible while talking with your students.
  Give feedback frequently, even if only very brief.

Although Lauren’s experience is primarily from higher education (post-18), this advice is also useful for K-12 educators.

What about digital equity and inclusion?

All our seminars include an opportunity to break out into small discussion groups, followed by an opportunity to ask questions of the speaker. We had an animated follow-up discussion with Lauren, with many questions focused on issues of representation and inclusion. Some questions related to the digital divide and how we could support learners who didn’t have access to the technology they need. There were also questions from breakout groups about the participation of groups that are typically under-represented in computing education in online learning experiences, and accessibility for those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). While there is more work needed in this area, there’s also no one-size-fits-all approach to working with students with special needs, whether that’s due to SEND or to material resources (e.g. access to technology). What works for one student based on their needs might be entirely ineffective for others. Overall, the group concluded that there was a need for much more research in these areas, particularly at K-12 level.

Much anxiety has been expressed in the media, and more formally through bodies such as the World Economic Forum and UNESCO, about the potential long-lasting educational impact of the current period of school closures on disadvantaged students and communities. Research into the most inclusive way of supporting students through remote teaching will help here, as will the efforts of governments, charities, and philanthropists to provide access to technology to learners in need.

At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we offer lots of free resources for students, educators, and parents to help them engage with computing education during the current school closures and beyond.

How should the education community move forward?

Lauren’s seminar made it clear to me that she was able to draw on decades of research studies into online and hybrid learning, and that we should take lessons from these before jumping to conclusions about the future. In both higher education (tertiary, university) and K-12 (primary, secondary) education contexts, we do not yet know the educational impact of the teaching experiments we have found ourselves engaging in at short notice. As Charles Hodges and colleagues wrote recently in Educause, what we are currently engaging in can only really be described as emergency remote teaching, which stands in stark contrast to planned online learning that is designed much more carefully with pedagogy, assessment, and equity in mind. We should ensure we learn lessons from the online learning research community rather than making it up as we go along.

Today many writers are reflecting on the educational climate we find ourselves in and on how it will impact educational policy and decision-making in the future. For example, an article from the Brookings Institution suggests that the experiences of home teaching and learning that we’ve had in the last couple of months may lead to both an increased use of online tools at home, an increase in home schooling, and a move towards competency-based learning. An article by Jo Johnson (President’s Professorial Fellow at King’s College London) on the impact of the pandemic on higher education, suggests that traditional universities will suffer financially due to a loss of income from international students less likely to travel to universities in the UK, USA, and Australia, but that the crisis will accelerate take-up of online, distance-learning, and blended courses for far-sighted and well-organised institutions that are ready to embrace this opportunity, in sum broadening participation and reducing elitism. We all need to be ready and open to the ways in which online and hybrid learning may change the academic world as we know it.

Next up in our seminar series

If you missed this seminar, you can find Lauren’s presentation slides and a recording of her talk on our seminars page.

Next Tuesday, 19 May at 17:00–18:00 BST, we will welcome Juan David Rodríguez from the Instituto Nacional de Tecnologías Educativas y de Formación del Profesorado (INTEF) in Spain. His seminar talk will be about learning AI at school, and about a new tool called LearningML. To join the seminar, simply sign up with your name and email address and we’ll email the link and instructions. If you attended Lauren’s seminar, the link remains the same.

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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 research symposium will now be held online on 1 April! We have made this decision to allow us, and you, to plan for it with certainty, given that the Novel Coronavirus situation is changing daily.

Book your free place today!

Unfortunately, the pre-symposium events on Tuesday 31 March are cancelled.

We are looking forward to the event, which has a great line-up of papers and speakers. See you online!

Are you an academic, researcher, student, or educator who is interested in computing education research? Then come and join us in Cambridge, UK on 1 April 2020 for discussion and networking at our first-ever research symposium.

Dr Natalie Rusk from the MIT Media Lab is our keynote speaker

Join our symposium

At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we carry out research that deepens our understanding of how young people learn about computing and digital making and helps to increase the impact of our work and advance the field of computing education.

As part of our research work, we are launching the Cambridge Computing Education Research Symposium, a new one-day symposium hosted jointly by us and the University of Cambridge.

The theme of the symposium is school-level computing education, both formal and non-formal. The symposium will offer an opportunity for researchers and educators to share their work, meet others with similar interests, and build collaborative projects and networks.

The William Gates Building in Cambridge houses the Department of Computer Science and Technology (Computer Laboratory) and will be the symposium venue

The symposium will take place on 1 April 2020 at the Department of Computer Science and Technology. The day will include a range of talks and a poster session, as well as a keynote speech from Dr Natalie Rusk, Research Scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory and one of the creators of the Scratch programming language.

Registration for the symposium is now open: book your place today!

Pre-symposium workshops and networking

When you register to attend, you’ll also have the chance to sign up for one of two parallel workshops taking place on 31 March 2020 at the Raspberry Pi Foundation office in Cambridge.

Workshop 1 concerns the topic of gender balance in computing, while in workshop 2, we’ll consider what research-in-practice looks like in the computing classroom.

The workshops will draw on the experiences of everyone who is participating, and they’ll provide a forum for innovative ideas and new opportunities for collaboration to emerge.

You’re also invited to join us on the evening of 31 March for an informal networking event over food and drink at the Raspberry Pi Foundation office — a great chance to meet, mingle, and make connections ahead of the symposium day.

Register for the symposium to secure your place at these events! We look forward to meeting you there.

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The project will investigate ways to make computing more inclusive.

The project

‘Gender Balance in Computing’ is a collaboration between the consortium of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, STEM Learning, BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, and the Behavioural Insights Team. Our partners, Apps for Good and WISE, will also be working on the project. Trials will run from 2019–2022 in Key Stages 1–4, and more than 15,000 students and 550 schools will be involved. It will be the largest national research effort to tackle this issue to date!

Our research around gender balance has many synergies with the work of the wider National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE) programme, which also focuses on pedagogy and widening participation. We will also be working with NCCE Computing Hubs when planning and implementing the trials.

How it will work

‘Gender Balance in Computing’ will develop and roll out several projects that aim to increase the number of girls choosing to study a computing subject at GCSE and A level. The consortium has already identified some of the possible reasons why a large percentage of girls don’t consider computing as the right choice for further study and potential careers. These include: feeling that they don’t belong in the subject; not being sufficiently encouraged; and feeling that computing is not relevant to them. We will go on to research and pilot a series of new interventions, with each focusing on addressing a different barrier to girls’ participation.

We will also trial initiatives such as more inclusive pedagogical approaches to teaching computing to facilitate self-efficacy, and relating informal learning opportunities, which are often popular with girls, to computing as an academic subject or career choice.

Signposting the links between informal and formal learning is one of the interventions that will be trialled.

Introducing our partners

WISE works to increase the participation, contribution, and success of women in the UK’s scientific, technology, and engineering (STEM) workforce. Since 1984, they have supported young women into careers in STEM, and are committed to raising aspirations and awareness for girls in school to help them achieve their full potential. In the past three years, their programmes have inspired more than 13,500 girls.

The Behavioural Insights Team have worked with governments, local authorities, businesses and charities to tackle major policy problems. They generate and apply behavioural insights to inform policy and improve public services.

Apps for Good has impacted more than 130,000 young people in 1500 schools and colleges across the UK since their foundation in 2010. They are committed to improving diversity within the tech sector, engaging schools within deprived and challenging contexts, and enthusing girls to pursue a pathway in computing; in 2018, 56% of students participating in an Apps for Good programme were female.

“A young person’s location, background, or gender should never be a barrier to their future success. Apps for Good empowers young people to change their world through technology, and we have a strong track record of engaging girls in computing. We are excited to be a part of this important work to create, test, and scale solutions to inspire more girls to pursue technology in education. We look forward to helping to build a more diverse talent pool of future tech creators.” — Sophie Ball & Natalie Moore, Co-Managing Directors, Apps for Good

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has a strong track record for inclusion through our informal learning programmes: out of the 375,000 children who attended a Code Club or a CoderDojo in 2018, 140,000 (37%) were girls. This disparity between the gender balance in informal learning and the imbalance in formal learning is one of the things our new research project will be investigating.

The challenge of encouraging more girls to take up computing has long been a concern, and overcoming it will be critical to ensuring that the nation’s workforce is suitably skilled to work in an increasingly digital world. I’m therefore very proud to be working with this group of excellent organisations on this important research project (and on such a scale!). Together, we have the opportunity to rigorously trial a range of evidence-informed initiatives to improve the gender balance in computing in primary and secondary schools.

If you work at a school in England you can register your interest in taking part in this project here.

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Senior Research Manager Oliver Quinlan chats to participants at Coolest Projects 2018

We do our research work by:

• Visiting clubs, Dojos, and events, seeing how they run, and talking to the adults and young people involved
• Running surveys to get feedback on how people are helping young people learn
• Testing new approaches and resources with groups of clubs and Dojos to try different ways which might help to engage more young people or help them learn more effectively

Over the last few months, we’ve been running lots of research projects and gained some fascinating insights into how young people are engaging with digital making. As well as using these findings to shape our education work, we also publish what we find, for free, over on our research page.

How do children tackle digital making projects?

We found that making ambitious digital projects is a careful balance between ideas, technology, and skills. Using this new understanding, we will help children and the adults that support them plan a process for exploring open-ended projects.

Coolest Projects USA 2018

For this piece of research, we interviewed children and young people at last year’s Coolest Projects International and Coolest Projects UK , asking questions about the kinds of projects they made and how they created them. We found that the challenge they face is finding a balance between three things: the ideas and problems they want to address, the technologies they have access to, and their skills. Different children approached their projects in different ways, some starting with the technology they had access to, others starting with an idea or with a problem they wanted to solve.

Achieving big ambitions with the technology you have to hand while also learning the skills you need can be tricky. We’re planning to develop more resources to help young people with this.

Research Assistant Lucia Florianova learns about Rebel Girls at Coolest Projects International 2018

We also found out a lot about the power of seeing other children’s projects, what children learn, and the confidence they develop in presenting their projects at these events. Alongside our analysis, we’ve put together some case studies of the teams we interviewed, so people can read in-depth about their projects and the stories of how they created them.

Who comes to Code Club?

In another research project, we found that Code Clubs in schools are often diverse and cater well for the communities the schools serve; Code Club is not an exclusive club, but something for everyone.

Code Clubs are run by volunteers in all sorts of schools, libraries, and other venues across the world; we know a lot about the spaces the clubs take place in and the volunteers who run them, but less about the children who choose to take part. We’ve started to explore this through structured visits to clubs in a sample of schools across the West Midlands in England, interviewing teachers about the groups of children in their club. We knew Code Clubs were reaching schools that cater for a whole range of communities, and the evidence of this project suggests that the children who attend the Code Club in those schools come from a range of backgrounds themselves.

Photo c/o Dave Bird — thanks, Dave!

We found that in these primary schools, children were motivated to join Code Club more because the club is fun rather than because the children see themselves as people who are programmers. This is partly because adults set up Code Clubs with an emphasis on fun: although children are learning, they are not perceiving Code Club as an academic activity linked with school work. Our project also showed us how Code Clubs fit in with the other after-school clubs in schools, and that children often choose Code Club as part of a menu of after-school clubs.

Visitors to Pi Towers Raspberry Jam get hands-on with coding

In the last few months we’ve also published insights into how Raspberry Pi Certified Educators are using their training in schools, and into how schools are using Raspberry Pi computers. You can find our reports on all of these topics over at our research page.

Thanks to all the volunteers, educators, and young people who are finding time to help us with their research. If you’re involved in any of our education programmes and want to take part in a research project, or if you are doing your own research into computing education and want to start a conversation, then reach out to us via research@raspberrypi.org.

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