About me

I am Director of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre . Since gaining a PhD in Artificial Intelligence in Education in 1993, I have worked as a secondary teacher, teacher trainer, university lecturer and researcher. I played a leading role in the DfE-funded National Centre for Computing Education, particularly around the development of the Teach Computing CurriculumIsaac Computer Science, and online teacher professional development courses. I was also the strategic lead (PI) for the £2m DfE-funded Gender Balance in Computing research programme, for which we published results in 2022. In my own research, I developed an approach to structuring programming lessons called PRIMM (Predict-Run-Investigate-Modify-Make), which has proved useful to many teachers around the UK and beyond. 

Research

My research interests are:

  • Computing education for K-12 (school-aged children)
  • Teaching and learning of programming
  • Making computing inclusive and accessible to all
  • AI education for young people
  • Teacher professional development for computing

I am interested in supervising PhD students in these areas.