Led by: Dr James Grant, Digital Data & Technology Group, and Dr Benjamin Morgan, Department of Chemistry

This project, which was awarded Teaching Development Funding (TDF), aims to bring together a community of lecturers and researchers across the University with an interest in teaching programming. The project will create a melting pot for discussion across the institution, sharing teaching approaches, tools and methodologies related to programming and digital methods. Alongside Curriculum Transformation and the Digital Skills Framework the project will seek to improve the digital skills of students and staff.

Jupyter notebooks (https://jupyter.org/) operates through a web-browser interface reducing traditional barriers with learning to program. Several departments already use it to teach Python for scientific computing, and other languages are also supported. Notebooks.azure.com is a free Jupyter service which can be enhanced with paid-for resources, if required.
This project will run pilot studies for current Postgraduate and Undergraduate teaching, identify teaching enhancement opportunities, and work with Microsoft to develop knowledge and specification for future solutions; for example, integrating with University teaching resources such as Moodle.

The project team also aim to work with departments that do not currently offer programming to create resources suitable for their students' needs to ensure that all students benefit. Sharing knowledge of platforms and developing a publicised, integrated service will also avoid duplication in resources where multiple departments evaluate solutions separately.

A full report of this project was given at a CLT Lunchtime Hub event in December 2020 - view here.