WIPSCE (Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education) is a great conference for those interested in computer science education in school to attend as it combines a really friendly and welcoming international community of researchers with a desire to encourage rigorous theoretical and empirical research in computer science education. The first international WIPSCE conference was held in Hamburg in 2012 and its origins lie in the German Informatics community, known as GI. In 2015 WIPSCE was held at King’s College London meaning its profile was raised within the UK.
Next year’s WIPSCE will be in Radboud, Netherlands in early November
ISSEP (Informatics in School, Situation, Evolution and Perspectives) has been running since 2005. It is a forum for researchers and practitioners in the area of Informatics education, in both primary and secondary schools. Informatics is the term used in Europe for Computing education.
Next year’s ISSEP conference will be in Helsinksi, Finland from 13th to 15th November. The Call for papers can be found here.
Last year these two conferences were combined, which meant there was a really good sized community and a great atmosphere of sharing and learning from each other.
Below are some pictures from the WIPSCE and ISSEP conferences 2016.
There were many highlights: Raymond Lister talked about the work he has been doing for many years on tracing and the neo-piagetian stages of learning to program. Marleen Villeroy won the best presentation award for her paper on CodeStitch, a collaborative learning to program environment based on reflecting on solutions using knitting as a domain. There were some great sessions on physical computing, both papers and workshop sessions in both ISSEP and WIPSCE Sessions
Jane Waite had a poster on Abstraction and Common Classroom Activities
Bill Robinson gave a demo of his adaptation of Scratch, called Patch, which incorporates some additional pedagogical features. I’ve heard it called Scratch on steroids.
Sue delivered a paper on her work with Valentina Dagiene on Bebras (presentation here). In addition, Sue presented the Teacher Research Projects Poster relating to the combined work of Carl Simmons (Edge Hill), Andrew Csizmadia (Newman) and Jane Sinclair (Warwick) with the Teaching Inquiry in Computing Education project.
Munster was a great location for the conference and we are looking forward to November 2017 in Radboud, Netherlands.
Sue Sentance 