Electronics and Computer Science Outreach

The last two weeks have been great as I have been doing outreach  sessions at Holy Family School and Bitterne Park Primary school. The classes had a challenge where they had a week to make a game with a learning objective. The majority wanted to teach people about their project on world war 2, healthy eating or maths problems. I allowed the pupils to use whatever language or tool they wanted as long as the game had a number of levels, was accessible and had a learning objective. The range of tools they used were: Scratch, Roblox, Kodu and Unity/Blender. Here is a summary of each tool and how they found it:

* Scratch: Scratch is a tool that the pupils had used before but not in any depth. Half of each class did not seem convinced by Scratch as they felt it was ‘babyish’. But understanding loops, variables and functions was great on this tool. It was also a good way of showing how loops worked. Those who used it, got a lot from it.

* Roblox: Roblox was a popular tool. It claims you can make a first person shooter in 15mins. Its true that it can be done but it is not the best to learn programming with as its more about creating a world with scenery. The programming side is based on Lua. Doing the scripting is not too difficult when pupils did it but to get any depth was difficult. I felt that at year 6, these students did not have the persistence to make it work. Whenever they came across a barrier, they seemed to give up and create a new world. By the end of the week they were getting better with persisting with the scripting. They were taught a new technique every day by me and the more they saw me do it, the more they persisted. The issue with Roblox is that it relies on a very good school network to make it work. The other issue is that it is open so students work was getting hacked and bad language was put on the screen by the hackers.

*Kodo: Kodu is the a tool created by Microsoft (so it won’t work on my mac). Its a 3d tool and there is the ability to do some scripting but it mainly works using flow charts and exploration of options. Students needed the most help on Kodu out of all the tools as the options were less intuitive but pupils were impressed with its graphics and were able to find helpful online tutorials.

*Blender/Unity: I had one pupil who decided to use Blender for this challenge. My experience of Blender is not as much as other peoples experience but I was able to help him a little bit. Its something that is popular with A-level students and Undergraduates so to see a year 6 student use it was a surprise. He used it well however, there were some aspect with Python he needed help with. The most helpful websites and tutorials were blocked on the school network. He finished making the game during the week which was impressive.

I have found that just because this age group might understand some aspects of scripting, programming and computing I do not think they are patient and persistent enough to keep going with it. They need intense help with a very experienced teacher in order to get an outcome they want. As these pupils play games they know what is possible and want to replicate what they have played.

Devasena

Our guest blogger is Devasena Prasad. She is s a researcher in the software sustainability group. She has been working closely with Codefirst. Here is her post:

Code First:Girls is a not-for-profit organisation and is run by Entrepreneur First Community Interest Company and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. They offer free coding courses, events and hackathons for girls who want to learn more about the industry and meet other like-minded young women with their mission to get young women skilled up and pursuing careers in tech. They have worked with >500 young women and have a real impact on the careers the participants choose- from working in a tech start-up, to building their own start-up, to becoming junior software developers.

They expressed interest in collaborating with University of Southampton and started a chapter on campus in Fall 2014 in this mission. I (Devasena Inupakutika) am the Web Programming campus course instructor for this semester. The course consists of 2-hour classes weekly on Fridays for 20-30 students from October 24 to November 28.

Code First recruited and selected the participants for this programme. Currently we have 16-20 students from different departments at the University for this year. The aim is to create an open and inquisitive atmosphere to allow students to ask questions and get their heads around the course material. I have been teaching web programming basics, HTML and CSS scripting languages for the past 4 weeks. With the newly acquired skills, some of the students have already succeeded in creating their websites/ portfolios based on different stylesheets and formats introduced to them in class.

All the course material along with homework are hosted on an open-source version control system called GitHub. The aim is to cover JavaScript in next 2 sessions and we’ll be having an internal website design competition for which CodeFirst: Girls will provide a prize. Participants will be divided into teams. Each member of the winning team will receive a £20 Amazon voucher and will be featured on CodeFirst’s website. We’ll also pitch the entry against those from the other 11 CodeFirst courses around the U.K. for an overall Grand Prize of lunch with a cool female entrepreneur.

 

 

A couple of weeks ago i arranged for the computing and maths female students at Barton Peveril College. I was at a school on that day so they went with their teacher and had the opportunity to watch a movie about the Eniac and learn about women in technology. They also got a chance to network with women in tech. These students will be coming to the university soon and we look forward to welcoming them. Here is the email from their teacher – Isabel:

Hi Reena

Just a huge thank you for arranging for us to go to Google to see the ENIAC documentary.

It was a great experience for all of us.

I knew nothing about these women programmer who basically invented programming in order to work th ENIAC. It was amazing and inspirational.  Have you seen this film?  If not you should try to.

And to see it at Google was great.  The students I took really appreciated it. Great for them to see so many women in programming as inspiration  All the women we met both from Google and other places were amazing women.

The people at Google were great at including my students even though I don’t think they were the intended audience.

But having said that most of the discussion was about getting more women into computing and really the best place to start is to convince women likes those I took that it is an amazing career that many women do successfully.

Thank you again.

Isabel

PS And the food was amazing too!

I was lucky enough to be invited to the Inspire College’s awards gala. I was invited because I have a work experience student who was receiving a maths award. Since Tom has been working with me, he has made a significant amount of progress. I am very proud of everything he is achieved. Well done Tom!

I was lucky enough to spend a week at Sinclair Primary school. I spent the week there teaching year 6 pupils all about designing their own computer games. I went in with the intention to teach them Scratch and then to get them to make their own game. However the majority felt that Scratch was ‘too babyish’ so they wanted to use Roblox. Roblox is a bit like Minecraft. But Roblox allows its users to create their own games. Its based on the Lua programming language. It attracts young people because its 3d and there is a lot of help with scripting.

There are issues though, because its security isn;t very good – games can be easily hacked into, it needs a very good school network to be able to run and its ‘too easy’. A user can make a game in 15mins which is impressive and uses very little code. This satisfies the user but teaches very little computational thinking.

The pupils I taught did not get away without doing any coding. They all had to do something. By the end of the week a lot of them were converted back to scratch because they understood it more…

A month a go my friend Chris introduced me to Young Rewired State. The aim of which is to get young people into coding. I was put in touch with someone who wanted to start a group in Southampton. We had our first meeting and it went really well. The aim is to get more people to turn up and to get female students to attend.

Erica went on a field trip to King Edwards School. She was there for the School’s digichamp event. She interacted with 60 school children. They learnt about Internet of Things, how objects can tweet and coding. It was a great event and we will put photos up very soon.

I was lucky enough to be invited to JPMorgan to deliver a talk about my PhD topic (from many years ago!) on how to get more women into computing. I compared the data from my PhD to some current data. So comparing thoughts and experiences of ICT to the new Computing GCSE.

The talk was really well received and I enjoyed giving it. I look forward to working with the group further.

So this week I had a meeting with Yvonne and Gill. Yvonne is a Research Fellow and Gill is our marketing officer. We met to discuss the ECS prospectus and how we can demonstrate that we are diverse department. In order to do this:

* Gill has organised a photo shoot to get an up to date photo bank so there are more ‘real photos’ rather than posed ones that are very old.

I am confident that we will soon start to build up a photo bank with up to date real photos.

It was very sad to see our Nano tech outreach lead Asa leave. I have just had a meeting with a very enthusiastic nano group who are very excited to talk about their new outreach plans. Watch this space!