The Institute of Coding

The Institute of Coding is a new £40m+ initiative by the UK Government to transform the digital skills profile of the country. In the context of significant national and international education and skills policy scrutiny, it responds to the apparently contradictory data that the country has a digital skills shortage across a variety of sectors, yet the university system produces computing graduates every year who end up unemployed, or underemployed.In this paper, we describe the background and evidence base for the Institute of Coding, its key themes and current activities, as well as reflecting on potential replicability of aspects of the Institute to other nations or regions with similar ambitions

Innovative pedagogical practices in the craft of Computing

Teaching programming is much more like teaching a craft skill than it is a purely theoretical subject. Hence an "apprenticeship" model, where apprentices learn by watching the master do, and then do themselves, and are criticised in their doing, is, we claim, more appropriate than the "lecturer/lecturee" model that universities implicitly adopt. Furthermore, there are generally many more apprentices than the master can personally supervise. Universities will therefore use various tutors, who should be regarded as the analogue of the guild-master's journeymen. However, how does one encourage this mindset in students who, for their other courses, are indeed lecturees? What are the implications for the journeymen

A Framework to Manage the Complex Organisation of Collaborating: Its Application to Autonomous Systems

In this paper we present an analysis of the complexities of large group collaboration and its application to develop detailed requirements for collaboration schema for Autonomous Systems (AS). These requirements flow from our development of a framework for collaboration that provides a basis for designing, supporting and managing complex collaborative systems that can be applied and tested in various real world settings. We present the concepts of "collaborative flow" and "working as one" as descriptive expressions of what good collaborative teamwork can be in such scenarios. The paper considers the application of the framework within different scenarios and discuses the utility of the framework in modelling and supporting collaboration in complex organisational structures

Awareness beyond mode error

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Beyond mode error: Supporting strategic knowledge structures to enhance cockpit safety

In the contextual complexity of modern, computerised systems, the current system state can come as an unpleasant shock to even an experienced user. In this paper, we show that errors, which occur within such complexity, cannot easily be described in terms of individual tasks and their component actions. We use this starting point to examine the dominant thinking in this field (Palmer, 1995, Palmer et al, 1993, Degani et al, 1996, Rushby 1999). We show this dominant position, which suggests that much of this ’automation surprise ’ (Palmer 1995) results from mode error, is a fundamental misclassification of the human factors involved. We then show the existence of a deeper problem, which we identify as a knowledge gap (Johnson 1992) between operator and system. We next assert the existence of a second, higher level of activity, which encompasses the strategies used by operators to manage tasks within a complex, changing environment. We show that the knowledge gap identified arises as the result of a failure in such a strategy and develop a new design solution, based on this re-classification. We then evaluate this new approach through the redesign of interfaces in a simulation of a welldocumented air-incident. The results of our evaluation show the redesign to be significantly less prone to the depicted error. We conclude by considering the implications of these results in terms of our knowledgebased approach

Dataset for 'How smart do smart meters need to be?'

This dataset consists of three subsets that represent several variables related to energy consumption in 43 households in the UK: 1) households' internal temperature, CO2 level, gas and electricity consumption before, during and after digital energy feedback phase; 2) energy literacy before and after the digital feedback; 3) user experience data after the digital energy feedback interventions