The following RIPPAs have concluded. You can find out more about the projects and their results by clicking for more info.
Escape room-inspired activities are increasingly used in education for their immersive, engaging nature. However, most implementations are linear and centrally controlled, limiting pedagogical depth. Physical escape rooms offer richer experiences but are costly and impractical at scale. This RIPPA explores a scalable alternative: non-linear, digital or hybrid escape room designs embedded within teaching materials. Addressing student disengagement in higher education, the project investigates whether playful, puzzle-based formats can improve engagement, enjoyment, and understanding. Focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) education, the activity builds on an initial implementation to bring educators together to co-develop, trial, and evaluate this approach. The group will share experiences, analyse data, and produce outputs to assess its pedagogical value. The findings may extend to wider computing education.
Despite the growing number of teaching-focused academics worldwide, a fair and consistent approach to their promotion is lacking. Research, a focus of more traditional roles, is still prioritised in many universities. Even promotion requirements written specifically for teaching-focused academics may confusingly hint at research, in particular educational/pedagogic research. As a result, teaching-focused academics may feel tempted to go into educational/pedagogic research. This poses a number of challenges at all career stages. The aim of this RIPPA is to study the specific promotion requirements of teaching-focused academics in Computer Science, the challenges that they face when going into Computer Science Education research, and the support offered by their institutions, before providing recommendations.
Research indicates that Sense of Belonging - the feeling of being accepted and valued within a community - consistently correlates with student success and well-being. This experience varies across race, ethnicity, and gender, with research showing disparities among computing students, particularly those from minoritized groups. During the COVID-19 pandemic, belongingness declined among non-minoritized students but increased for minoritized women, suggesting a potential benefit of virtual environments for some groups. Post-pandemic surveys reveal that belongingness levels have not fully rebounded, especially among minoritized men, highlighting the need for targeted interventions. Since 2017, researchers at University College Dublin have studied this phenomenon and are now expanding their work across the UK, inviting collaboration through the RIPPA initiative at UKICER 2023.
Despite research and policy efforts to broaden participation, computing education in the United Kingdom and Ireland is still characterised by low levels of participation and diversity among its student population. Recent research suggests that capital plays a significant role in student participation, referring to the legitimate, valuable and exchangeable resources which can be used to generate social advantage within specific fields. This Research in Practice Project Activity (RIPPA) will investigate a survey developed to measure forms of capital which enable students to participate in computing-related fields, and succeed in it. The survey will be distributed by RIPPA participants among universities all over the United Kingdom and Ireland. Using Confirmatory Factor Analysis, the hypothesised survey structure will be assessed in terms of model fit to the observed data, and adjusted to achieve a survey with high internal consistency among the items and factors. With the proposed model, group differences will be investigated using the Mann-Whitney U test. In addition, thematic analysis of open-ended questions will further reveal the motivation of why students engage with computing education. Ultimately, the goal of this collaborative research effort is to broaden participation in computing education in the United Kingdom and Ireland, by developing an understanding of the factors underlying student participation, and how this relates to various forms of capital that students have access to.
The RIPPA 2021 aims to find out whether a) first-year students with better spatial skills have better programming skills (regardless of teaching environment or method), b) whether spatial skills change over a period of computing instruction and c) what demographic data contribute towards high spatial ability. Future goals of the project will be to investigate whether improving first-year students' spatial skills improves their programming skills (regardless of teaching environment or method).