WELCOME TO UKICER 2021

The United Kingdom and Ireland Computing Education Research (UKICER) conference from the UK ACM Special Interest Group in Computing Science Education is emerging as one of the leading venues nationally and internationally for researchers and practitioners to meet and share advances in computing science education.

The UKICER 2021 theme is gathering ideas together and has been chosen to emphasise that (1) computing science education research comprises of many different areas and ideas, including cyber security and data science, and (2) to celebrate practice that brings people together and makes the most of people in the same space.

We are a diverse and inclusive community bringing together researchers, academics, industry practitioners and teachers from across the United Kindgom and Ireland as well as from the rest of Europe and the wider world.

The conference takes place on Thursday 2nd of September and Friday 3rd of September 2020 virtually and physically in the historic and beautiful Gilmore campus of the University of Glasgow.

For more information: http://www.ukicer.com

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

The United Kingdom and Ireland Computing Education Research (UKICER) conference from the UK ACM Special Interest Group in Computing Science Education is seeking high quality contributions to research relevant to computing science education. Contributions are sought in a variety of categories with emphasis on high-quality and rigorous work.

Papers

Papers should describe a rigorously executed piece of work, include a motivating research question and discussion of prior related work. We welcome:

- Reseach papers describing a research experiment in a school, university or informal educational setting. The experiment should be rigorously conducted – if this is the case, null results will still be considered for publication.

- Tool design papers which carefully document design constraints, user considerations, relevant pedagogical concerns, and justify the design decisions taken in a way that would be useful to other designers, and include details of user testing or other initial measures of effectiveness.

All submitted papers should have a research component. Papers focused purely on practice-related topics such as implementation of new curricula or new course designs may be better suited to our sister Computing Education Practice conference.

Paper Format and Submission

Papers should be submitted in ACM double-column conference proceedings format(/a). The page limit is six pages, not counting the references. The references may occupy a seventh page if the paper reaches the six page limit. Papers must be submitted in an anonymised form for double-blind review. Accepted papers will be included in the proceedings, and presented in a session at the conference.

Workshops

We invite proposals for running 1-2 hour workshops. The workshops should be relevant to British and Irish educators (in a university or school setting) and/or computing education researchers. Example workshops may be on the use of research techniques (e.g. qualitative methods), grant writing, pedagogical techniques (e.g. peer instruction), tools (e.g. programming environments, assessment tools), or any other topic which may be relevant to conference attendees.

Workshops will take place in the afternoon of first day of the conference. Workshop organisers will be given an opportunity to advertise their workshop via a one-minute lightning talk earlier in the conference.

Workshop Format and Submission

Workshop proposals should consist of a max 500 word abstract, which should include: details of the workshop’s content, practical requirements (e.g. group discussion tables, computer room, etc) whether or not this workshop has been run before, and intended take-away knowledge for participants.

Authors

Submissions for both research papers and workshop proposals should be made using Easychair. There is an option on the submission form to indicate whether the submission is a research paper or workshop proposal. If you have any questions, please contact the programme chairs.

Submission guidelines

For all submissions please use the ACM templates. Be sure that all of your submissions abide by the ACM Conflict of Interest Policy.

Authors of papers must submit an anonymous version with all references to the authors removed (including authors names and affiliations plus identifying information within the body of the paper such as websites or related publications). After a paper is accepted, authors will be asked to submit a camera-ready version which includes all the author details and identifying information.

Note that reviewers will assume they are reviewing completed works, as they will eventually appear in the conference proceedings. Do not submit incomplete drafts. Electronic submission is required. All submissions should be in Portable Document Format (PDF).

To submit your work, visit the EasyChair submission pages. After you create an account, if you do not have one, you will find a submission form that requires you to enter the type, title, and abstract of your submission, plus author contact information.

Accepted submissions

If accepted, final papers must be submitted in camera-ready format, electronically, as PDF files. These final submissions will be published in the conference proceedings.

At least one author must register for the conference and present the accepted paper for it to appear in the conference proceedings. All accepted submissions must be presented at the conference by a subset of the authors.

Publication of proceedings

The official publication date of the conference proceedings is when they become avaliable via the digital repositry. The specific date may be upto 14 days prior to the initial day of the conference. Contributors should be aware of this publication date when considering other artefacts associated with published work, e.g. patent filings.