Screenshot of options to pay for empty seat next to you or single seat.

Finnish train options living up to the extra personal space stereotype: options include paying extra for single seat or paying extra to keep the seat beside you empty.

Consistency of grading programming assignments When students write programming assignments, we generally want to grade them with a number or letter grade. This may be for homework/coursework or for controlled assessments such as exams. Anyone w…

New blog post about a new paper on the consistency of grading programming assignments. We looked at this under-researched area, finding poor inter-grader consistency and poor self-consistency. More details here: academiccomputing.wordpress.com/2025/09/03/c... and in the paper linked within.

Unlocking AI & Computer Science 2025 An online programme for female and non-binary students

The excellent KCL outreach team are once again running a free 8-week online programme this autumn about AI & CS for Year 12-13 female and non-binary students. Sign up by 28 September, details here: www.kcl.ac.uk/events/unloc...

Sport at academic conferences I organise and play in two football [soccer] games a week, which is a big part of my “life” side of work/life balance. Whenever I go to conferences I miss playing and I always had in mi…

New blog post about the couple of football games I organised at conferences this summer, including video proof... academiccomputing.wordpress.com/2025/08/26/s... We should do more of this sort of thing!

ICER and paper length ICER 2025 took place last week and there is now a very brief limbo period before preparations begin for next year. This point, midway through my two-year term as its program co-chair seems like a u…

#ICER2025 took place last week and this seemed a good time to jot down some thoughts on paper length and various other issues that affect ICER's program: academiccomputing.wordpress.com/2025/08/12/i...

Since both awards involve the group of my program co-chair Leo Porter, it's probably worth pointing out the awards commitee who decided both is appointed separately by the steering committee and had nothing to do with us. To my mind, just shows Leo has a great track record.

Just added the ICER best paper and lasting impact award winners to the ICER front page: icer2025.acm.org Congratulations to all the authors of those papers!

Pycon UK in September features a talk on our Strype project ( strype.org ) from my colleague Pierre, if you're interested and near Manchester. Lots of other interesting-looking talks and a keynote from @felienne.bsky.social - what more could you want?

Trying to get hold of an iron at the hotel and have twice been told "I've put a ticket in our system for it", which of course is software developer speak for "good luck with that, I ain't doing it".

They never seem to think to ask the next question...

Without remembering any knowledge how do you know what question to ask AI? How can you sense check it? What are you "thinking critically" about?

We went through all this already with Google.

Reads like an early modern social media feed.

When I grow up I want to be as engaging a presenter as Miles.

Miles Berry presenting a slide.

Travelled a long way to hear a talk from a guy down the road @milesberry.net

@joshuagl.bsky.social Maybe this actor could voice Strype for us? ericwbailey.website/published/yo...

Weather Report (TV Series 2005–2022) ⭐ 9.2 | Comedy, News 1m

So I now learned that Lynch went on to do daily weather reports on Youtube after this - for so long that it has its own IMDB page: www.imdb.com/title/tt1231... Rated 9.2/10.

@joshuagl.bsky.social @felienne.bsky.social Found this while looking up Deadwood... bsky.app/profile/neil...

Quote: "Timothy Olyphant is thinking about the Sex Pistols. "I was at an Arlo Guthrie show at UCLA last week," he says, rolling his eyes at the thought of the ancient singer of the hippy anthem Alice's Restaurant. "I just remember thinking, 'Man, if [former Pistols guitarist] Steve Jones was here he'd start booing,' and I really, really wanted to do the booing for him. Man, that show was a snore – I just didn't believe a word that came out of their mouths." Punk credentials firmly established, Olyphant sips his latte, which has a perfect heart sculpted into its milky surface. The Steve Jones connection isn't so odd. For years, the ex-Pistol had the lunchtime spot ("Jonesey's Jukebox") on LA radio station Indie 103.1. The show before that had Olyphant as its on-air, unpaid sports commentator. He walked in one morning to promote Deadwood, writer David Milch's savage and foul-mouthed reorientation of the classic TV western for HBO, and walked out having agreed to fill in for a while for an as-yet unhired presenter. He stayed for two years. "Yeah, I was sports – and David Lynch did weather." He's not kidding. "He only did the weather for the moment, right this second, not for the whole day. There was no forecast per se, just him calling in saying, 'This is what the weather's like outside right now.'""

Can't even decide how to caption this about LA radio. Incredible.

Program - ICER 2025 The 21st ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research will take place from Sun 3 to Wed 6 August 2025 in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States. It will be a hybrid conference: you m...

ICER 2025 program is now available, feat. 31 papers: icer2025.acm.org/program/prog... Registration is open for in-person or virtual attendance.

Wasted half a day trying to track down one of those "this is impossible" bugs only to find a directory with test-foo.ts and (stale) test-foo.js in it, which was the cause of the whole trouble. The stale set were the tests that were failing.

But just to add: I like PyTamaro and I think the compositional approach saves coordinate-faffing for creating static pictures. We're just finalising support for third-party libraries in Strype which would enable making the PyTamaro API available in Strype as mentioned in the post.

IMO either you provide _place_at_coordinates to students (which is giving them a cartesian API) or you have to teach them to do it in each program - I don't think adding (and dynamically resizing every frame) an invisible rectangle to align the placement is a straightforward concept at school level.

TBH I only just added the types this week for our auto complete. I don't know if Sphinx can add them from the type comments, will look into it.

Good point, I've linked it now in the post: strype.org/doc/library/ We should have asked you earlier! But released now. Sounds and Images in the API have immutable dimension/duration so you do need to pass the length, but the length is redundant if you pass the sound content.

The Newcastle one just gave us final notification yesterday lunchtime, so Pierre hasn't added it yet (and I misunderstood his message; the Manchester one is still waiting a decision so I've edited that out for now)

Strype’s new graphics API Our latest project is Strype, a frame-based editor for Python which runs in the browser. We released 1.0 last year which let you run console and Turtle graphics code, but we were itching to add our…

With the release of Strype's new graphics API I've written a blog post explaining some of the design decisions we faced and took: academiccomputing.wordpress.com/2025/06/05/s...

Does anyone know of a tool that can take a list of references as input and produce a subset of those references that don't appear to correspond to a published work in any digital library? Detecting reference hallucinations is becoming an important tool for peer review...

It isn't possible to design a school system where everyone leaves with the skills needed for the workplace because *they're all going to do different jobs*.

Workplace training needs to be done by employers.

AI literacy for postgraduate researchers The rise of artificial intelligence powered tools is influencing research work across many disciplines. But with these new tools come new responsibilities. For PhD students navigating the shifting …

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be an AI literate postgraduate student.

I put together some thoughts in a blog post: csed.phd/2025/05/17/a.... It's not a how-to guide, more like a reflection on what it means to use generative AI tools critically, responsibly, and with curiosity.

Howzat? Evaluating Human and AI Hints for Novice Programmers We have a new paper available at the TOCE journal today (official open-access link, or watermark-free personal copy) about LLM vs human-generated hints for novice programmers. It was authored by ou…

We have a new paper out today in TOCE, featuring our foray into LLM territory to generate hints for stuck novice programmers. Blog post about it, with links to the public/free paper: academiccomputing.wordpress.com/2025/05/30/h...