This is a hybrid event; attendees can either join in person or on Zoom. If the latter, please click on the 'Register for this event' button in the top right corner of this webpage, and fill in the form to receive the Zoom link.

If you would prefer to attend in person, the seminar will take place in Room G/8, in the Waterloo Bridge Wing of Franklin Wilkins Building, King's College London, Stamford Street, SE1 9NH. If you are not a member of CRESTEM, please email crestem-events@kcl.ac.uk to RSVP.

Places are limited; please register early to avoid disappointment.

 

Teaching subjects such as computer science, which has a rich network of abstract concepts and heavy-going technical vocabulary, is hard for undergraduates. No wonder, when faced with these same topics for school-aged students to learn, educators look for ways to make the learning more palatable and easier for students to build knowledge.

Legitimation Code Theory, LCT, is a framework for exploring social practices and is used by scholars internationally across disciplines (from ballet to the law) to shape research and inform practice. LCT makes the tacit visible, providing a way to describe social experiences and allowing the opportunity to discuss, analyse, change, and improve learning events.

These factors motivated Jane Waite to use one dimension of LCT, Semantics, to explore Computer Science teaching and learning. She has worked with Professor Karl Maton at the University of Sydney, the proposer of LCT, on several LCT research projects, along with Professor Paul Curzon, an expert in Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. This team has used semantic profiling to analyse lesson plans that teach computational thinking to young children and undergraduates learning programming concepts. Jane has also explored with Karl how semantic profiling can be used to create feedback, with feedforward, for students when they answer multiple-choice questions incorrectly. She has also used the framework to develop explanations to support teams in understanding the new subject of machine learning when designing teaching materials.

In this seminar, Jane will introduce LCT, semantics, the various LCT research studies she has worked on, and how to semantic profile learning events. She is keen to hear what others think about the approach and any similar frameworks attendees may know.

 

Speaker: Dr Jane Waite

Jane Waite is the senior research scientist at the Raspberry Pi Foundation within the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre. The research centre is a joint initiative between the University of Cambridge and the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Jane manages a team of research scientists and assistants who design and conduct research across a range of computing themes. Current research studies include primary culturally relevant pedagogy, teaching machine learning to school-aged learners and the international teaching of computing.

Jane's personal areas of research include Legitimation Code Theory and teaching design in primary programming. Jane is the Computing At School Research and Universities Chair, which exemplifies her commitment to the computing education research community and research to practice.