Human-Centred Computing News

Two of the department's First Year students, Tim Hollies and Andrew Sula have been successful in winning highly competitive scholarships from Asidua.

This scholarships will offer support as follows:

£1,000 per year for each of the scheduled academic years of the course; At least eight weeks paid summer work between each academic year; A guaranteed paid industrial placement in year three; After completion of industrial placement, the opportunity for paid part-time work during the academic year; Following an application for a permanent position and subject to success at interview, in accordance with Fair Employment legislation, a permanent position with Asidua after graduation. As a result, each scholarship is worth up to £25,000 to the successful candidates.

Asidua is a software consultancy and services company, headquartered in Belfast with engineering and sales offices in Birmingham and Dublin. It employs over 120 people. Asidua delivers world-class integration, software and consultancy services to government and corporate clients based in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, mainland Europe, USA and the Far East.

Scholars will get to work with very experienced individuals who mentor them in software engineering best practices, and will gain real world experience of working in teams and increase their confidence and communications skills. They will also gain a better understanding of what a career in IT is all about. Such work based learning or placement is invaluable for the student, as they will gain excellent industrial experience during their time with Asidua. Since they will work on real projects within the Company, this will increase their chance of employment following graduation.

More Information:
http://www.asidua.com/portal/careers/our-scholarships/scholarships-at-warwick-university/

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today the next winner in the New York City Applied Sciences Initiative.

The Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) is an applied science research institute which will be a partnership of top institutions from around the globe, led by NYU and NYU-Poly with a consortium of world-class universities including The University of Warwick, Carnegie Mellon University, The City University of New York, The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and The University of Toronto. Industry partners include IBM, Cisco, Siemens, Con Edison, National Grid, Xerox, Arup, IDEO, and AECOM.

Warwick Computer Science will play a significant role in CUSP, with new and existing academics providing research and teaching in areas including operations research, service computing, complexity theory, networking and communications, data analytics, modelling and visualisation.

The completed institute will host 50 faculty and researchers and over 500 masters-level and PhD students. Students and staff from Warwick Computer Science will be able to engage in urban sciences projects in the New York ‘living lab’, in areas including smart buildings, digital healthcare, transport solutions, and public safety.

The Centre will open its doors to its first class of Warwick-CUSP students in September 2013.

For more information see:

1. http://www.nycedc.com/press-release/mayor-bloomberg-new-york-university-president-sexton-and-mta-chairman-lhota-announce
2. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/warwick_only_european/
3. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/04/urban-science-centre-born-in-the-big-apple.html

Last week a training day was held in the Department for ICT/Computing teachers interested in starting GCSE Computing in their school. While all the main Boards are offering this qualification we were pleased to have our opening talk from the Chief Examiner for the OCR GCSE Computing, Sean O'Byrne. It became typical of the whole day, that even in this first session, many participants (30 teachers or advisors) interjected with vigorous, sometimes critical, questioning and discussion. It was an intense day with sessions on practical sorting activities at KS3, on programming (Scratch and Greenfoot), on the potential of on-line support especially for programming, and on what to do next! Two major themes that emerged were:

(i) problems associated with the assessment of programming tasks and the kinds of teacher intervention and support that are allowable and desirable,

(ii) how should teachers new to programming choose and learn languages suited to the GCSE and suited to students gaining valuable concepts for future work in computing.

There was a huge range of experience among those present: some had been on the OCR pilot scheme already for two years, others were committed to starting the GCSE this September, some had industry experience of programming, others no programming knowledge at all. The day proved a good success for most participants (judging by the detailed feedback) and will result in our setting up a dedicated schools portal (soon) and preparing to offer further CPD training for teachers this July.