The pandemic has accelerated changes to the way we teach and learn. Join us to discuss the Covid-19 shutdown: when studying turns digital, students want more structure : a paper by Vegard Gjerde, Robert Gray, Bodil Holst and Stein Dankert Kolstø on the effects of the pandemic on Physics Education at a Norwegian University. [1] All welcome, as usual, we’ll be meeting on Zoom see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for details.

If content is king, then his rule is tyrannical. Bill Gates once remarked that “Content is King” but In the kingdom of education, how much do educators oppressively inflict content on their learners? What can be done to reduce the tyranny of content? We’ll be discussing this via a paper by Christina I. Petersen et al, here’s the abstract: All welcome.

Cognitive Load Theory provides a basis for understanding the learning process. It has been widely used to improve the teaching and learning of many subjects including Computer Science. But how can it help us build better collaborative learning experiences? Join us to discuss via a paper by Paul Kirschner, John Sweller, Femke Kirschner &

Both graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs) are crucial to facilitating students learning. What goes on inside the mind of a teaching assistant? How can understanding this help us train TA’s better for the roles they play in education? Join us to discuss via a paper by Julia M. Markel and Philip Guo.

Learning sciences aims to improve our theoretical understanding of how people learn while computing education investigates with how people learn to compute. Historically, these fields existed independently, although attempts have been made to merge them. Where do these disciplines overlap and how can they be integrated further?

With great power comes great responsibility. [1] Given their growing power in the twenty-first century, computer scientists have a duty to society to use that power responsibly and justly. How can we teach this kind of social responsibility and ethics to engineering students?

Following on from our discussion of ungrading, this month we’ll be discussing pass/fail rates in introductory programming courses. [1] Here is the abstract: Anyone is welcome to join us. As usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom, see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for details. Thanks to Brett Becker and Joseph Allen for this months #paper-suggestions via our slack channel at uk-acm-sigsce.slack.com.

The more time students spend thinking about their grades, the less time they spend thinking about their learning. Ungraded (pass or fail) assessment provides an alternative to letter grading (A, B, C etc) which can address this issue.

Peer instruction is a tried and tested technique for teaching popularised by the Harvard physicist Eric Mazur. Join us to discuss the use of peer instruction in introductory computing via a paper by Leo Porter and his collaborators, [1] which won an award from the ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium Top Ten Papers of All Time.

Minimal guidance is a popular approach to teaching and learning. This technique advocates teachers taking a back seat to facilitate learning by letting their students get on with it . Minimal guidance comes in many guises including constructivism, discovery learning, problem-based learning, experiential learning, active learning, inquiry-based learning and even lazy teaching.

The use of git is widespread in software engineering, however many novices struggle to get to grips with its complex distributed information model, challenging command line syntax and leaky abstractions. To investigate these pitfalls, we’ll be talking about a paper published by Santiago Perez De Rosso and Daniel Jackson on Purposes, Concepts, Misfits, and a Redesign of Git at OOPSLA. [1] From the abstract: So what’s wrong with git?