Using Skills Profiling to Enable Badges and Micro-Credentials to be Incorporated into Higher Education Courses

Employers are increasingly selecting and developing employees based on skills rather than qualifications. Governments now have a growing focus on skilling, reskilling and upskilling the workforce through skills-based development rather than qualifications as a way of improving productivity. Both these changes are leading to a much stronger interest in digital badging and micro-credentialing that enables a more granular, skills-based development of learner-earners. This paper explores the use of an online skills profiling tool that can be used by designers, educators, researchers, employers and governments to understand how badges and micro-credentials can be incorporated within existing qualifications and how skills developed within learning can be compared and aligned to those sought in job roles. This work, and lessons learnt from the case study examples of computing-related degree programmes in the UK, also highlight exciting opportunities for educational providers to develop and accommodate personalised learning into existing formal education structures across a range of settings and contexts

A National Engagement Model for Developing Computer Science Education in Wales

Computer science education in the United Kingdom has undergone substantial scrutiny, and in England a new computing curriculum has just been introduced. However, in Wales - a devolved nation within the UK - political, geographical and socio-technical issues have hindered any substantive educational policy or curriculum reform for computer science over the past ten years. In this paper we present the activities of Technocamps, a university-based schools outreach programme founded in 2003 and its wider impact on computer science education and teachers in Wales. Furthermore, with imminent curriculum reform, we frame the wider opportunity for sustainably embedding both high-value digital competencies and computer science education - as well as changing the wider public perception and importance of computer science - as a prospective replicable case study of a national engagement model for countries with similar aspirations of becoming digitally confident and capable nations

OnTrack: Reflecting on domain specific formal methods for railway designs

OnTrack is a tool that supports workflows for railway verification that has been implemented using model driven engineering frameworks. Starting with graphical scheme plans and finishing with automatically generated formal models set-up for verification, OnTrack allows railway engineers to interact with verification procedures through encapsulating formal methods. OnTrack is grounded on a domain specification language (DSL) capturing scheme plans and supports generation of various formal models using model transformations. In this paper, we detail the role model driven engineering takes within OnTrack and reflect on the use of model driven engineering concepts for developing domain specific formal methods toolsets

Teaching Computing via a School Placement

Across Wales - as, but even more so than, elsewhere - there is a critical shortage of teachers who are qualified to teach Computer Science. This issue is particularly coming to the fore now due to on-going changes to the national school curriculum which is seeing a rigorous computer science curriculum replacing the ICT curriculum which has been passed off as computing in most schools over the past several decades. In this paper we describe the efforts made by Technocamps to tackle this problem by encouraging computer science graduates to consider education as a viable career option. In particular, we outline a credit-bearing module which incorporates an extensive school placement. We discuss the challenges with setting up and running such a module as well as its effectiveness

Technoteach: Supporting Computing Teachers Across Wales

Intensive curriculum reform is currently being undertaken in Wales across all school years and all subjects. However, political, geographical and socio-cultural issues have to date hindered any substantive educational policy or curriculum reform for computer science, due ultimately to the marked lack of teachers who are qualified and/or confident to teach the subject. In this paper we describe Technoteach, a University-based model for supporting prospective computer science teachers and thus drive the delivery of the evolving computer science curriculum across Wales. We argue its need, justify its methodology, and detail its impact

Teaching The Early: Formal Methods in School

In this paper, we describe a programme of school engagement aimed at instilling a discipline of computational thinking within pupils before they embark on a university course. The workshops we deliver are designed mainly to increase the pipeline of school leavers going on to study computer science or software engineering, specifically by changing perceptions on what this means amongst the vast majority - particularly girls - who think it is just a geeky topic for boys.Over the past number of years, student enrolment has been increasing dramatically in our university's undergraduate computer science and software engineering degree programmes. Also, the performance of the students on first-year formal methods modules - which has historically been poor - has risen substantially. Whilst there are many influences contributing towards these trends, we present evidence that our efforts with school engagement has to a non-trivial extent contributed towards these: both through the way the undergraduate programme has been adapted to incorporate the Technocamps approach, and through providing a pipeline of students who understand the principles of computational thinking

Unique Decomposition of Processes

AbstractIn this paper, we examine questions about the prime decomposability of processes, where we define a process to be prime whenever it cannot be decomposed into nontrivial components.We show that any finite process can be uniquely decomposed into prime processes with respect to bisimulation equivalence, and demonstrate counterexamples to such a result for both failures (testing) equivalence and trace equivalence.Although we show that prime decompositions cannot exist for arbitrary infinite processes, we motivate but leave as open a conjecture on the unique decomposability of a wide subclass of infinite behaviours