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I was brought up in Kenya and was a teenager in the 1980's. I was pretty lazy at school: I knew I could get good results without trying too hard, so I didn't. 'Rebecca could do much better if she put in more effort...' appeared more than once on my school reports.
When I was about 12, a family friend introduced me to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum that he had brought back from the UK. I was absolutely hooked and somehow - I still have no idea how! - my dad persuaded him to let us buy it off him. This was the beginning of my love of programming: many hours were spent learning BASIC, copying games from magazines, making animations (one pixel at a time) and creating music. I did an O Level in Computer Science (many hundreds of lines of code written on a Spectrum and printed out on a dot-matrix printer), followed by a career in software development. The City was a grim place for a young female programmer in those days and I don't miss it one little bit!
After a career break whilst my children were young, I did a Master's degree and starting lecturing at the University of Hertfordshire. During my career break, I had run programming clubs for pupils and CPD courses for teachers. Since the Royal Society Report "Shutdown or Restart?" and the advent of Computing At School, I have become increasingly involved in CPD for teachers, co-leading CAS East and working with Teach Computing and the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
I left UH to set up a Computer Science department in a local secondary school in 2016. I created everything from scratch: the SoW and all the teaching materials and am very proud to see the positive impact it has on pupils and the increasing popularity of the subject right up to A Level.
In any spare time I have, you are likely to find me playing computer games, at the cinema or fiddling with tech.
As well as being a full time HoD and having two teenagers, I am also doing a part-time MPhil at Cambridge University, facilitate courses for Teach Computing (NCCE), am an examiner for Cambridge International and am Code for Life's Educational consultant. It keeps me pretty busy but I love it all and it all enhances my teaching! :-)
I am so delighted that Computer Science is back in schools - I think it has much to offer all pupils - and proud to be a small part of realising its potential.
Publication
Publication
If only I had time to pluralise that!
https://helloworld.raspberrypi.org/issues/9
Published Teaching Resources
Published Teaching Resources
Raspberry Pi Project - Seven Segment LED (uses of binary registers) on TES and CAS
Python GUI Examples from Hello World to GUI generation on CAS
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Links
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