In September 2024, I attended the WiPSCE conference in Munich, Germany. WiPSCE is an annual conference that brings together researchers from around the world to focus on computer science education research for primary and secondary (K–12) learners. After the success of WiPSCE 2023, which was hosted by the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre in Cambridge, I was looking forward to reconnecting with researchers and visiting the Technical University of Munich, as well as the beautiful city of Munich in southern Germany. 

This year marked a personal milestone: For the first time, I had both a poster and a full paper published at the conference,  and so I was both excited and nervous to step in front of the international audience and present our work with teachers about adapting computing resources to be culturally responsive.

Our PhD student Salomey at Marienplatz in front of the Neues Rathaus (New Town Hall) in Munich city centre.

Presenting a poster on pupils’ perceptions

My poster presentation focused on primary school pupils who had taken part in culturally adapted computing lessons. In this work, we ran focus groups with pupils, and analysed their responses using the Integrated Interest Development for Computing Education Framework (IIDfCEF), in collaboration with Alex Hadwen-Bennett from King’s College London. The results were promising: Students felt more represented in their computing lessons and in particular felt their interests were recognised. The theory of culturally responsive teaching was new to many conference attendees, and so I had some really interesting conversations explaining how this approach can help to develop computing education that is responsive and relevant to a more diverse group of learners. 

I spoke to lots of conference attendees about our exploratory work on pupils’ reponses to culturally relevant computing. 

Using identity in computing activities 

During my full-paper presentation, I engaged with the whole audience on the importance of recognising and leveraging students’ diverse backgrounds, identities, and cultural resources in education. I shared findings from our study where teachers adapted image editing and vector graphics activities, enabling students to create identity artefacts—projects reflecting the various elements that hold importance in their lives. 

We used a framework called funds of identity to analyse and identify the different facets of students’ identities that were illuminated in the artefacts they had created. Our findings showed that students were most likely to reveal practical funds of identity such as their interests, hobbies and favourite activities, and that all seven funds of identity (see the illustration below) were included in students’ images. This demonstrates the diverse cultural resources that students bring to the classroom and the potential of adapting computing lessons in ways that resonate with students’ lived experiences.

In this framework, identity is shaped by seven different types.

Representing the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre

The Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre was well represented at the conference. Dr Sue Sentance was co-chair of the Program Committee, and also ran a workshop on trustworthiness in qualitative research alongside Salomey Afua Addo, a PhD student here at the research centre. Jane Waite presented about autonomy, and explained how this dimension of Legimation Code Theory can help researchers, resources developers and educators analyse computing activities that teach computing through other forms of knowledge. Her paper, co-authored with Paul Curzon and Karl Maton, prompted lots of interest and questions in the discussion, as researchers started to consider how these important insights might be relevant for future work. 

Overall, I had a fantastic experience at WiPSCE 2024. As a junior researcher in the field, I gained valuable insights into the latest developments in computer science education research, and I met lots of researchers who are working on interesting challenges in this field. 

The next WiPSCE conference, scheduled for March 2026 at the University of Aachen, offers an exciting opportunity to continue these conversations. WiPSCE is moving from previously being an Autumn conference to being a Spring conference, and so there will be no WiPSCE in 2025. I hope to return to future WiPSCE conferences and present more of my work here at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Centre, and I’ve also earmarked Munich as a great place to revisit. 

Find out more

Here are two useful resources to explore further details about our study and the WiPSCE conference: