@neilccbrown.bsky.social
Senior Research Fellow in Computing/Programming Education at King's College London, UK. Research and development of novice programming tools, including BlueJ, Greenfoot and Strype.
Nice to experience different train systems... UK trains: we've cancelled the train you booked due to emergency engineering works but we won't notify you so you have a nice surprise. Swiss trains: we've changed the platform your train goes from six times today, and we've emailed you each time.
BlueJ 6.0.0 has now been released, with support for developing in Kotlin. You can use any combination of Java, Kotlin and Stride in BlueJ projects, thanks to features added by JetBrains. Available here: bluej.org
Available countries to pick from in an ACM dropdown: "England UK", "Gt Britain", "No Ireland", "Scotland UK", "United Kingdom" and "Wales UK" Interesting set.
The key to the neural networks that underlie LLMs is to have layers of processing. For example, I'm using ChatGPT to fix the incorrect code Claude gave me after I asked it to improve the incorrect code ChatGPT gave me.
Two ways to read this. One is “she lost on every substantive claim, completely failed in her attempts to ban trans staff from the workplace, and won mild procedural victories against her employers handling of her case”. The other way is, I guess, “point one is longer so it must be more important”
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.
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.
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…
academiccomputing.wordpress.com
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...
Unlocking AI & Computer Science 2025
An online programme for female and non-binary students
kcl.ac.uk
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!
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…
academiccomputing.wordpress.com
#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...
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…
academiccomputing.wordpress.com
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?
PyCon UK@pyconuk.org · last yr.📣📣 Announcement: full PyCon UK 2025 programme is now LIVE! 📣📣 It’s here, folks! The full schedule is up, and it’s chock-full of talks, workshops & more! 🎉🐍🌟 Schedule is over here 👉 buff.ly/9UtKEOl Tickets this way 👉 buff.ly/83NpL2R #Python #TechEvents #development #manchester #PythonProgramming
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.
Tom Richmond@tom-richmond.com · last yr.Apparently Tyler Cowen is a well-known economist and commentator. Perhaps he should stick to economics rather than exposing his profound ignorance by saying stuff like 'remembering things and achieving well is irrelevant thanks to AI'. www.businessinsider.com/ai-reveals-h...
Reads like an early modern social media feed.
Eleanor Doughty@brushingboots.bsky.social · last yr.Love old papers. Fancy having such a list today!
@joshuagl.bsky.social Maybe this actor could voice Strype for us? ericwbailey.website/published/yo...
Can't even decide how to caption this about LA radio. Incredible.
![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.'""](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:3a5tjfyg2f3uipjobbosru5y/bafkreigjcyzww5lurnxd6r6iwa2evcnrjrtn5oyos6qbsbs3zom5xtu4uy)
ICER 2025 program is now available, feat. 31 papers: icer2025.acm.org/program/prog... Registration is open for in-person or virtual attendance.
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...
icer2025.acm.org
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.
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...
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…
academiccomputing.wordpress.com
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.
The Observer@theobserveruk.bsky.social · last yr.We need our children to leave school ready for life in the real world To ensure that young people embarking on a career have the skills and mindset employers are looking for, education must be linked more closely to the workplace, writes David Blunkett.
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.
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 …
csed.phd
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...
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…
academiccomputing.wordpress.com
ATTENTION: Free Computing Teachers Conference Our speakers are now confirmed for CKC 2025: @dsyme.bsky.social @megjlow.bsky.social @beckyfranks.bsky.social @tracygardner.bsky.social @lollypopstar.bsky.social @neilccbrown.bsky.social @suesentance.bsky.social Sign up here: tinyurl.com/CKC-Kings
Using AI to debug syntax escaping issues in generated Python and interestingly it sees a backslash where there is none because of the way I'm escaping invalid tokens that looks like classic backslashes unicode escapes.
Just one university - UCL - employs almost twice as many people as there are working in fishing boats.
Will Jennings📉🗳️@drjennings.bsky.social · last yr.A reminder that more people are employed in the yoga industry than there are registered fishers working in the UK.
