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Miss Jane Waite

Jane

Teaching Fellow & Public Engagement, Outreach and Teacher CPD Co-ordinator

Email: j.l.waite@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: Peter Landin, CS 300

Teaching

Procedural Programming (Undergraduate)

This is an introductory module in computer programming using Java. You will learn the basic concepts of programming and learn to write and reason about simple programs. The main topics covered are: storing and manipulating data, control structures, methods and recursion, and algorithms for searching and sorting data. Classes include weekly lectures and lab sessions. You will be assessed by coursework throughout the term and by an end-of-term exam. Both will require you to demonstrate that you can write programs and understand theory.

Research

Research Interests:

My research interests are based around Education, Computational Thinking and Programming. I am particularly interested in understanding what 'abstraction' means, how we already teach it, how this might change to improve young children's skills in this area and what progression looks like.
I am also very interested in how we teach pupils to program and the role of tinkering to support understanding of programming constructs and how this then tips into purposeful programming. Also how pupils create their design/algorithm and how they abstract to create that design/algorithm. This then leads to debugging and what the difference might be between strategies for debugging projects with a design and those without, i.e that evolved from tinkering.

Girls and computing is another area I am particularly keen to look at. In 2015, only 456 girls in the UK took A level computing, with 5000 boys taking the subject. We have had a huge rise in pupils taking GCSE with 33,000 sitting the exam in 2015, but the % of girls is around 15%. There are similar problems across the STEM subjects. What can we do to address this imbalance? Real current role models, less gaming projects, collaborative and 'female friendly' environments.... ideas welcome.

My first publication is a poster  paper accepted by WiPSCE here is the link on ACM Digital Library http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2978249.2978272 

Waite, J. et al., 2016. Abstraction and common classroom activities. In Proceedings of the 11th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education. ACM, pp. 112?113.


The poster for the paper is linked here.

Publications

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