05.11.20
Assessment in the NPA Data Science
Educators interested in offering the National Progression Award (or NPA) in Data Science often wonder about how assessment works for NPA qualifications, and for the NPA Data Science specifically. NPAs are available in a variety of subject areas and assess a defined set of skills and knowledge in specialist vocational areas. Learners…
05.11.20
Software for the NPA Data Science
One of the most common questions we get asked about the new National Progression Award (NPA) in Data Science is what software or programming languages will schools need to run the course. The NPA has been designed to provide a great deal of flexibility in the software tools that can…
17.09.20
Book Review: The Ethical Algorithm
Book Review of ‘The Ethical Algorithm: the Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design’ by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth I am reading ‘The Ethical Algorithm: the Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design’ by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth, and it has reminded me why I like computer science. Computer science…
01.09.20
New project: Designing conversational assistants to reduce gender bias
Recently, biased machine learning has received increased attention. This project will address a different type of bias which is not learnt from data, but encoded during the design process. We illustrate this problem on the example of Conversational Assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, or Google’s Assistant,…
27.08.20
How to Increase Computing Student Numbers – Growing a new generation of computer scientists
How to Increase Computing Student Numbers I was asked to speak at the SQA Computing Conference at the beginning of this year so I decided to talk about something which had been puzzling me recently. Why are the number of computing students at school dropping in Scotland, when the number…
27.08.20
Moray House Staff and Students Supporting Online Learning
Moray House Staff and Students Supporting Online Learning by creating Moray House Online. During early March, schools and universities closed and education for most people changed completely. The staff and students within Moray House School of Education and Sport came together with a desire to help learners, teachers, parents and…
27.08.20
Badgers: Evidence of absence or absence of evidence?
Absence of evidence or evidence of absence is a common scientific discussion point. How can badgers help us understand it more clearly. When we moved into our house, our neighbour told us that he often saw badgers in his garden. “Great”, we said, hoping we’d see them gamboling outside our…
27.08.20
Apps & Tools to support data literacy
Data literacy is becoming an increasingly important skill. The good news is that means many organisations are starting to develop apps & tools to support data literacy with learners of all ages (an their teachers!) in their journey to develop their data skills. The list below provides links to some…
27.08.20
Computing Education with Industry support
Computing education with industry support Helping young people develop digital skills is important part of their educational experience. It can be challenging to keep up to date with the ever increasing number programs and tools that we are using in the classroom. One way of gaining some support is to…
26.08.20
Data Explorers – Yummy Graphs!
Did you know you can eat a data visualisation?! Introducing Data Explorers – Yummy Graphs! It is easy to think that data visualisations are just 2D bar charts created in Excel or using a pen and paper but our colleague Kate Farrell has has been showing us some playful and…
26.08.20
Data Explorers – Asking Questions about Coronavirus
Data Explorers – Asking Questions about Coronavirus One of the first learning areas we explore within our data science curriculum is questions. We encourage young people to use question words to find more depth in data. For example you might ask someone what programs did you watch last week? This…
26.08.20
Data Explorers – Happy Graphs
Data Explorers – Happy Graphs – Having fun with Twitter Data Data Explorers is our occasional blog series that aims to provide interesting ideas and discussion topics using data. Each video is 8 to 10 minutes long and aimed at teachers and other adults. We aim to consider diverse topic areas…