Nerdy Strutting: How to Put Women Off the Tech Industry
A reflection on how interaction patterns in the tech industry might be off putting to women even if they are not offensive or explicitly exclusive.
Judy Robertson
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Levels of Abstraction; Pre-Teens and Career Choices
Mark Guzdial writes about the need for programming languages to support multimedia at all levels. Judy Robertson shares insights about 12-year-old students' lack of understanding about computer science.
Belinda Parmar's book Little Miss Geek highlights the gender imbalances within the tech industry, offering practical suggestions of how businesses can overcome this. It's a great message, but I do protest at the suggestion that women need help with their spatial abilities to help them succeed with their programming!
Coder Dojo is an inspired movement to bring the joys of programming to young people everywhere. The Edinburgh (Scotland) coder dojo started last night in the Scottish Parliament building, becoming part of a loose network of dojos all over the world. Why not start one where you live? All you need is a venue, some mentors and some kids.
When Is User-Centered Design Selfish?
User-centered design is now firmly established within HCI research. It is commonly praised for democratising system development and empowering users. But is this always the case? This article raises some ethical questions surrounding the involvement of certain vulnerable user groups in user-centered design.
Scientific discovery games are an exciting new approach to solving thorny scientific problems using contributions from a distributed group of non-expert humans. The approach has been successful in the domain of biochemistry, but can it also be used in other domains? This article discusses challenges in a current project where we are attempting to get humans to solve problems in hair curling-ly complex quantum information processing by playing a game inside a Perspex hamster ball.
CS and Popular Culture; Learning From Console Games
Mark Guzdial writes about why computer science should permeate popular culture. Judy Robertson discusses the educational benefits of using console games in the classroom.
‘Girls Can’t Program in Their Heads’: Gender and Games in the Computing Classroom
An overview discussion of the probems surrounding computing education in UK schools, particularly lack of participation in CS by girls. It is partly based on empirical data over several years, and partly my own speculation.
Likert-Type Scales, Statistical Methods, and Effect Sizes
Judy Robertson writes about researchers' use of the wrong statistical techniques to analyze attitude questionnaires.
It's the Turing Centenary Year. Why not plant a sunflower to celebrate? Manchester University, Manchester Science Festival and the Museum of Science and Industry are asking people to grow sunflowers and count the number of spirals in their seed heads in order to test Turing's theory that the seeds grow in Fibonacci sequences.
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