Published Work
Here is the list of publications where I am an author. Each paper links to a description of the work and the conferences I've been to to present the work.
You can view all my work in Google Scholar
- Introducing the Intranet of Things for Education (FabLearn'22)
- Energy in schools: Empowering children to deliver behavioural change for sustainability (IDC'22)
- Plug-and-play physical computing with Jacdac (IMWUT'22)
- CircuitGIue: A Software Configurable Converter for Interconnecting Multiple Heterogeneous Electronic Components (IMWUT'23)
- Introducing Classroom Cloudlet: a mobile, tangible, and transparent approach to Internet of Things education (IDC'23)
- Supporting fieldwork for primary education with computing-micro: bit, clip: bit and game controllers (IDC'23)
- Meet MicroCode: a Live and Portable Programming Tool for the BBC micro:bit (IDC'24)
- Imagining Inclusive Digital Maker Futures with the BBC micro:bit (IDC'24)
- Plug-and-Play Physical Computing and Device Prototyping with Jacdac (GetMobile'24)
- Tangible tools for data science education (WIPSCE'24)
- MicroCode: live, portable programming for children via robotics (UIST'24)
2022
Introducing the Intranet of Things for Education
Paper - 6th FabLearn Europe / MakeEd Conference, Copenhagen
This demo was really fun. I connected a micro:bit to a webpage running on my laptop. Then sent radio messages from other micro:bits around the room to this "bridge" micro:bit. The webpage was a live feed of the data these micro:bits were collecting, in this case: temperature. I also added an external feed of local weather and what the UK energy mix is for that moment. This was the first demo I created. I extended the demo to drag and drop micro:bits around the floorplan.
I used this webusb code to help me get the micro:bit connected.
Here's my code
Energy in Schools: Empowering Children to Deliver Behavioural Change for Sustainability
Paper - Proceedings of the 21st Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference, IDC, Braga, Portugal
This was my first short paper. I travelled to Portugal with my supervisor Elisa to present to the IDC community who were very friendly and supportive.
Energy in Schools was a project we did with a group of partners on a government grant to help schools save money on their energy bills, lower their energy use and educate everyone in the school about energy. The 20+ schools involved used different IoT Samsung sensors and the micro:bit to gather data around the schools. We helped develop the resources for these schools.
Plug-and-play Physical Computing with Jacdac
Paper, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), Volume 6, Issue 3
The main author on this paper was James Devine, a former PhD student at Lancaster University. He started developing Jacdac in his PhD and continued when he joined Microsoft as a researcher. Jacdac is a plug and play modular system for micro:bit. It is very cool and easy to use. I really like the live simulator in MakeCode. As part of this paper I helped interview three teachers who tried out jacdac and gave feedback.
CircuitGIue: A Software Configurable Converter for Interconnecting Multiple Heterogeneous Electronic Components
Paper, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), Volume 7, Issue 2
CircuitGlue was a project done by Mannu Lambrichts in Belgium. It's an electronic prototyping board that facilitates the connection of off-the-shelf electronic components and modules. I helped with this paper by interviewing a teacher, a maker and an electronics expert explaining what CircuitGlue is and asking them their opinions on it.
2023
Introducing Classroom Cloudlet: a mobile, tangible, and transparent approach to Internet of Things education
Demo, Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC), Chicago
This was a demo that we took to Chicago along with the poster below. I basically took two fully disassembled clouds in my suitcase in case any part of one cloud broke! Luckily we didn't have trouble getting it through security. We did have to buy a battery pack as I forgot one! Again the IDC community were really friendly, and there was a lot of interest in the cloud. We brought some clip:bits with us too. At this stage we had yet to do a in class study with either but were excited by their potential!
Supporting fieldwork for primary education with computing - micro:bit, clip:bit and game controllers
Poster, Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC), Chicago
Liz Edwards wrote this paper and created the poster about her journey of data collection in schools using the micro:bit then finally developing the clip:bit. I love this poster!
2024
Meet MicroCode: a Live and Portable Programming Tool for the BBC micro:bit
Paper, Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference, IDC'24, Delft.
This was a long paper with Kobi Hartely as the first author. Kobi and Elisa did the majority of the writing for this paper with Elisa doing a stellar effort on the background research. I ran the classroom sessions in primary schools in Blackburn and Morecambe, gathering feedback from the students and the teachers as well as observing the lessons. Tom Ball from Microsoft Research also helped write the technical parts of the paper as he's a developer and supporter of MicroCode.
MicroCode is a really cool language for the micro:bit. The program is written in When:Do statements, e.g. WHEN I press button A, DO show a smiley face. It is made for a mobile shield so the students don't need a computer or a tablet or even the internet. It's also all icon based with alt tags when you scroll over an icon, so could have potential for children who are pre-literate.
Delft was lots of fun! Lots of walking and almost being run over by cyclists. It was a great conference as so many of us from Lancaster went :)
Imagining Inclusive Digital Maker Futures with the BBC micro: bit
Paper, Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference, IDC'24, Delft.
This workshop was run by Tom Ball at IDC. We demonstrated our work with micro:bit, clip:bit, jacdac, microcode, etc. All the attendees got to take home a microcode shield with jacdac accessories! This was my first time seeing jacdac working with microcode and I blown away! Coding modular hardware with no computer, no words, no soldering or fiddly connections. It's the future!
Tangible tools for data science education
Poster, Proceedings of the 19th WiPSCE Conference on Primary and Secondary Computing Education Research, WiPSCE '24, Munich, Germany.
I wrote a poster about my PhD research on the clip:bit and the Cloudlet and submitted it to WiPSCE. I went to WiPSCE in 2023 in Cambridge and it was a great conference, very different to other conferences I've been to. After each talk, you discuss it with the people around you, then you can ask the speaker questions! They also print all the proceedings which is great for taking notes.
We timed Munich badly and left on the Thursday after the conference. The famous Oktoberfest started on the Friday :D
Plug-and-Play Physical Computing and Device Prototyping with Jacdac
This was a shorter article based on the Jacdac paper from the 2024 paper above.
MicroCode: live, portable programming for children via robotics
My last conference on 2024! I really liked the look of UIST and wanted to go for a while. I was realy lucky to get funding to go to Pittsburgh with my poster and we added an extra trip into Seattle to visit Microsoft Research including the MakeCode team. The trip should have been amazing but I suffered with tooth pain for a lot of the trip and had to have $3000 worth of root canals in Seattle!
UIST was still amazing. The biggest conference I've been to so far, around 800 people. And our poster won an award!
2025
Coming sooon!
SIGCSE experiennce report: Toolkit for Educators of Data Science: Using Physical Computing to Support Data Science Education in the Classroom