GW4 Coding
University of Bath: James Davenport (PI)
University of Bristol: Ian Holyer, Nick Wu
Cardiff University: Pete Burnap
University of Exeter: Richard Everson, Mike Baldwin
Background
The Prime Minister has stated that he wants to make the UK the best place in the world to do internet business. To do this we need the best-trained staff. The new National Curriculum in England, and similar initiatives in Wales, are a partial response to this staffing need.
A particular focus of Government policy has been Cybersecurity, with a variety of initiatives in this area. However, there is little research in the U.K. on the training of teaching programming (particularly high-quality, secure, programming), and on the technology that could underpin this.
Project summary
The community formed a GW4-wide Strategy Team that knows the overall capabilities of the region, with sub-teams specialist in certain areas, capable of responding to specific bids. The community held five meetings to scope the area of research, and through these designed and implemented a major national survey on the teaching of programming which fed into a publication and future bids.