Research

My research this year is in Computing Science Education, working with the Centre for Computing Science Education (CCSE) team in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. My focus is on underlying, usually considered innate, skills which may contribute to aptitude in computing science, specifically looking at the area of spatial skills. Spatial skills have been linked to success in STEM areas for many years, though the relationship with computing science has not been well explored and is more tenuous than other areas like engineering or chemistry.

The purpose of my research is to identify specific factors of spatial skills which appear to be related to computing science and investigate whether the relationship is causal, indicating that training these factors would lead to an increase in computing performance.

In addition to this research, I am currently employed as a research assistant in the CCSE involved in the Computer Science department's endeavour to deliver Graduate Apprenticeships in 2019. The research is currently focussing on existing research in work based learning and a large scale consultation with both practitioners of existing programmes and industry partners.

Publications

Investigating the Relationship Between Spatial Skills and Computer Science

Jack Parkinson and Quintin Cutts. 2018. Investigating the Relationship Between Spatial Skills and Computer Science. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 106-114. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3230977.3230990