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.

Published this year by Oxford University Press, How to Get Your PhD: A Handbook for the Journey by Gavin Brown [1] is essential reading for anyone thinking of doing, or trying to get through, a PhD.

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?

So what happened was, I’d been having some chest pains for a while and sleeping badly but didn’t think too much of it. Like many parents, we were struggling to balance the competing demands of two full-time jobs with an extra one called homeschooling small children.

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?

Last week, the 18th Feburary, was the 30th birthday of 30 something, the second album by Sarf Londoners Jim Bob and Fruitbat. Better known as Carter USM, their album was released in 1991 on Rough Trade Records, and was a commercial and critical success.

Five years ago today, Colin Vearncombe passed away. While his birth name might not be familiar to many people, his stage name Black and the song Wonderful Life he wrote and performed are much more widely known. Wonderful life achieved commercial success across Europe in 1987. This haunting tune caught my again ear recently.

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: Vast numbers of publications in computing education begin with the premise that programming is hard to learn and hard to teach.

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.

If the Gallagher brothers were software engineers: Tomorrow never knows what it doesn’t know too soon.