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Research projects

Computing for all

Child looking at a laptop

We aim to understand and work to remove the barriers to computing education, including the factors obstructing young people’s engagement and progression in computing as a subject and career.

Gender Balance in Computing programme

We are conducting the largest ever set of trials on interventions that aim to overcome barriers for girls engaging with computing in school. Read more about gender in computing in our series of blog posts on the Teach Computing blog and in our paper on the factors impacting gender balance in computing.

Culturally responsive teaching

Funded by a SIGCSE Special Projects grant we have developed guidelines for educators to support them with culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching. Making computing culturally relevant means that learners with a range of cultural identities are able to identify with the examples chosen to illustrate computing concepts, to engage effectively with the teaching methods, and to feel empowered to use computing to address problems that are meaningful to them and their communities. You can find more information on our culturally relevant pedagogy for computing education page.

Computing education and learners from low-income families

We have recently published a paper on computing skills, beliefs and identities in young people from underserved communities, as part of a project that you can read about in a blog post about the study.

G-VERSITY

As part of a multi-institutional EU-funded project, we are working with the University of Surrey on a study to understand how parents may influence girls’ decisions about computing.

Broadening participation

As part of an ITICSE working group, we are contributing to a systematic literature review to investigate attempts to broaden participation in university computer science courses.

Teaching and learning computing

Two girls working on a Scratch project

We research computing education in formal and non-formal settings, investigating processes of learning and teaching, as well as teacher professional development.

Non-programming aspects of the curriculum

We are working with Oak National Academy to investigate non-programming aspects of the computing curriculum in England and how they are learned.

Classroom talk in programming

Following on from previous research on Predict-Run-Investigate-Modify-Make (PRIMM), we are investigating the role of language in the programming classroom and will be presenting our latest paper at the ICER conference.

Computer science for learners aged 14 to 18

Aligned with our work on the Isaac Computer Science platform, we are collaborating with the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge to research ways in which young people aged 14 to 18 learn computer science.

AI and data science education

We are embarking on a new research project to investigate how best to learn and teach the fundamentals of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science — more details to follow. We’re also inviting researchers and educators to a series of monthly online seminars on this topic, hosted in 2021/2022 in partnership with The Alan Turing Institute