We frequently read in the computing education literature that learning to program is ‘difficult’, which can lead to learners and teachers in schools becoming fearful of even attempting it. However, this is not necessarily the case; we have seen many tools introduced in recent years that scaffold the learning, minimise errors, and promote confidence in young learners. Alongside tools, teachers can develop practices and strategies (pedagogical approaches) that can make programming accessible to even the youngest learners.

In this talk, I will be focusing on programming pedagogy in the school context, and will share a range of strategies that teachers can adopt in the classroom: strategies which stem from research literature and have been tried and tested in the classroom. In doing so, I’ll draw on research and practice examples from our own context in England, which will hopefully provide useful and practical takeaways.

Sue Sentance is Director of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, UK. She received her PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh University in 1993, and since then has worked as a secondary teacher, teacher trainer, university lecturer and researcher. She was the Chief Learning Officer for the Raspberry Pi Foundation from 2018-2023, and in that period played a leading role in the DfE-funded National Centre for Computing Education.

Sue’s research interests include programming pedagogy, particularly PRIMM, teacher professional development, AI education and culturally relevant pedagogy, and has edited a textbook for prospective teachers and researchers: Computer Science Education: Perspectives on Teaching and Learning in School. In 2020 Sue was awarded a Suffrage Science award for Maths and Computing and in 2017 the BERA Public Engagement and Impact Award for her services to computing education.

In many subjects, assessments present students with a problem and ask them to create non-trivial artefacts: essays and poems in a Language class, derivations and proofs in a Mathematics class, flowcharts and code in a Computational Thinking class, etc. Today, easy-to-access Generative AI tools can quickly create plausible artefacts for such problems, but these artefacts are not always correct. Thus, instead of focusing only on creating such artefacts, we believe that students in this Generative AI era must develop the ability to critique such artefacts.

This workshop will introduce participants to Refute questions, which seek to develop this ability. A traditional “create an artefact” problem can often be converted quite easily into a Refute question by presenting students with an incorrect artefact and asking students to explain why the artefact is incorrect. We will see several examples of such questions in the context of Mathematics and Computational Thinking, and participants will develop additional Refute questions during the workshop.

Target audience: Mathematics and Computational Thinking teachers (Classes 6 to 12).

Viraj Kumar is a Visiting Professor at KIAC. He completed his PhD (2007) in computer science and later taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was awarded the Rose Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education (2011). Viraj Kumar’s primary research areas are in educational technology and computer science education, with emphasis on India-specific challenges. He serves as an elected member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India Council (2021–24) and chairs its Educational Initiatives Committee. He has contributed to the development of the revised All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) computer science curriculum (2022) as well as the international CS2023 curriculum. Previously, he served as a consultant to the Kasturirangan Committee for drafting the National Education Policy (NEP 2020), and to the Ministry of Education’s committee creating the National Curricular Frameworks. At KIAC, Viraj experiments with novel forms of assessment in undergraduate and postgraduate courses. At present, his work explores responses to advances in machine learning (ML)-assisted code generation techniques such as GitHub Copilot.

In addition, he conducts outreach programmes for training high school mathematics teachers and computer science faculty in higher education. For schoolteachers, his recent efforts include integrating computational thinking into IISc’s training programmes at Challakere. For faculty, he contributes as a Steering Committee member and course lead in Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Delhi’s CSEDU Programme, and also offers shorter-duration training programmes at IISc.

In this workshop participants will explore a couple of puzzles related to the middle school mathematics and computational thinking curriculum. If time permits we will also play games. A frequent question any mathematics teacher receives is ‘but why are we learning this’. The puzzles are related to active research and are selected to demonstrate that abstraction can be useful, beautiful and natural without complicated formulae or advanced tools.

Target audience: All Subject teachers (All ages welcome).

Jyothi Krishnan works at the Centre for Creative Learning at IIT Gandhinagar where she plays and creates games, teaches and does some mathematics. Prior to working at CCL she ran a board game lab at an alternative school in Bangalore and has obtained degrees from NIT Calicut, IIT Madras and UC Berkeley. She has worked as a programmer, a bridge engineer, a research mathematician, a game-lab facilitator and a school teacher.