Academic Computing

We maintain BlueJ, a Java (and now Kotlin!)

When students write programming assignments, we generally want to grade them with a number or letter grade.

I organise and play in two football [soccer] games a week, which is a big part of my “life” side of work/life balance.

ICER 2025 took place last week and there is now a very brief limbo period before preparations begin for next year.

Our latest project is Strype, a frame-based editor for Python which runs in the browser.

We have a new paper available at the TOCE journal today (official open-access link, or watermark-free personal copy) about LLM vs human-generated hints for novice programmers.

Last week we held our privacy and legislation birds-of-a-feather at SIGCSE 2025 (pictures from National Aviary nearby).

Next week I will be at SIGCSE 2025, where Andreas Stefik, Samantha Schwartz and I will be runnning a birds of a feather session on “The implication of accessibility and privacy legislation on classroom programming tools”.

I’m acting as one of the ICER 2025 program chairs, and that has me thinking about reviewer workload in Computing Education Research.

His majesty’s revenue and customs, or HMRC, is the UK equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service in the USA.