New Funding Call for PhD students to attend conferences

With most national and international conferences currently being held on-line due to the pandemic, SICSA is taking the opportunity to open a new funding call which will allow PhD students, currently studying in a SICSA institution, to apply for the cost of the registration fees for a virtual conference. If there is a specific Conference … Read more

Exploring the SQA NextGen project and the impact on student transitions

23 March 2021 By Debbie Meharg, Edinburgh Napier University In February a SICSA Education event hosted by Edinburgh Napier University explored the HN Next Gen project and the implications for direct entrants into computing degrees. Bobby Elliott from SQA gave the keynote and explained that the HN qualifications in Computing were last revised in 2003, … Read more

United Kingdom and Ireland Computing Education Research 2020 conference

12 January 2021 By Dr Joseph Maguire, University of Glasgow The United Kingdom and Ireland Computing Education Research (UKICER) conference is sponsored by the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) UK Special Interest Group in Computing Science Education (SIGCSE) chapter and is emerging as one of the leading venues nationally for researchers to meet and share … Read more

SICSA Education – In the Loop

18 December 2020 By Mark Zarb, SICSA Director of Education First of all – you’ll remember that at SICSA Conference, we had Professor Sally Fincher (Professor Emerita, University of Kent) give a talk about Educational Resilience. She then joined the Education Champions in a Panel format, taking questions from the audience. These videos have been … Read more

2-0 for Edinburgh vs Glasgow in the SICSA Programming Challenges

25 November 2020 By Hans-Wolfgang Loidl, Heriot-Watt University The series of SICSA Programming Challenges, started during lock-down in June 2020, is continuing and featured a Scotland-wide, SICSA-funded challenge, called “dynamic Denning”, on Wed 21st of October. As before, a sequence of programming tasks was posted on the OpenKattis platform which provides a huge repository of … Read more

SICSA and ScotCHEM are coming together for a Speed Networking Fortnight

SICSA and ScotChem are coordinating a fortnight of short remote one-to-one calls between researchers to stimulate inter-disciplinary exchanges of research ideas and agendas.  Working across disciplines is notoriously difficult in ordinary circumstances, but the restrictions caused by the current pandemic have even further curtailed opportunities for chance encounters at conferences, or meetings that lead to … Read more

SICSA Artificial Intelligence Research Theme…..recruiting a new Co-theme Leader

Applications are invited for any suitable member of academic staff within a SICSA Institution to co-lead the SICSA Artificial Intelligence Research Theme. Role Purpose SICSA is the Scottish Funding Council Research Pool in Informatics and Computer Science.  The goal of SICSA is to cohere the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science research communities to help increase … Read more

Ada Scotland Festival: welcoming young women into computing

2 November 2020 By Ella Taylor-Smith, Edinburgh Napier University   The Ada Scotland Festival grew out of a SICSA-sponsored workshop, Addressing Gender Imbalance in Computing Science Education, organised by Dr Matthew Barr (University of Glasgow). From this workshop, a core collaboration* emerged to create an online Festival which would: welcome girls and women into computing/ … Read more

Computing Science Education Research at the University of St Andrews

By Dr Dharini Balasubramaniam, University of St Andrews October 2020 The Higher Education Research Group at the School of Computer Science in the University of St Andrews was established in January 2018 with the aim of giving an identity to staff interested in higher education research and to facilitate collaboration among them. There are around … Read more