TL;DR: We are writing the book; time to pitch your chapter(s)! [Submit by 1 April 2025 12 noon GMT]; Online Writing Retreat [20 Feb 11-1pm GMT]
Premise of the book ‘Teaching Programming across Disciplines’ (working title):
The book is intended to be a collection of short chapters, organised around a number of overarching themes. Main audience are the teachers of programming (schools/ further/ higher/ CPD) across disciplines, including academics and industry professionals with an interest in practical programming education.
Chapters could be e.g. case studies, examples of good practice, reflection pieces. You can think of it as a print version of the type of things people presented at the Edinburgh Winter School over last 2 years.
Format of a chapter ‘Pitch’:
Pitches are short proposals of what you and your team members would like to contribute to the edited book. Think more about an ‘initial idea’ than a well-formed ‘abstract’. Its goal is to get other people excited about working together on this, especially before you know exactly what you will write about.
How and By When to submit the Pitches:
Submit your pitch using the form below. It should include:
- a working title,
- a list of team members/co-authors for your chapter,
- a brief description of the roles of each team member, to give an idea of what perspective you will be writing from,
- Your Pitch! Up to 300 words outlining your proposed contribution,
- Your suggestion(s) for the format (e.g. case study, multimedia resources, etc.).
Please submit your chapter(s) pitches by 1 April 2025 12 noon GMT via this form https://forms.office.com/e/KH5nXdLLZJ.
You’re likely to want to contribute more than 1 chapter, in that case, please submit the form multiple times. While chapters are written by a group of people, one of you (the submitter) will be the contact person.
Five example Pitches we wrote:
See attached word document for a few example pitches we created.
Examples chapter formats:
At this point you are just submitting pitches for chapters. Once in the book, chapters are likely to be 2-4 pages, have some images and maybe visuals. They might describe a case study, student perspective or teaching method, or take a more playful approach, e.g. pretend to be a ‘cooking recipe’, tips and tricks, listicle, provocation, multimedia resource or anything else.
We’ve attached a document where you will find some example Pitches we wrote based on the conversations at this year’s Winter School.
How a book will be made: Titles suggested on the wall -> teams submit Pitches -> teams write Chapters
In Short: Many of you wrote Titles on the wall during the Winter School. Next small teams of authors gathered around those ideas will submit Pitches for what they want to work on. Then those teams will work on fleshing out their Book Chapters.
Almost 80 chapter titles were written on the wall and in the online chat during the Winter School. Now it’s time to turn those ideas into chapter pitches.
For those of you who have put your names on any titles (your own, or someone’s), we will write separate emails to handshake you so you can create a team. The writing retreat (below) is a great opportunity to meet online with your team and shape together a Pitch.
Chapter Titles so far (from the winter school)
In the post linked below you will find all chapter titles written on the wall during 2024 and 2025 winter schools, and names attached to them (if any were written). Use it to see what other things people are excited about, and to get in touch, if you’d like to join a team.
That page will be updated every few months (probably next time will be after the pitches deadline). Later on other people will be able to join, or drop out of chapter teams, but we need to start somewhere!
Online writing retreat: Thursday 20 February 2025 11:00 – 13:00 GMT
We will be hosting a series of writing retreats (online, in person, and hybrid) to support our community in developing the book together. We have scheduled the first writing retreat online Thursday 20 February 2025 11:00 – 13:00 GMT.
For joining instructions please email us at pairprogramming (at) ed.ac.uk
Join us to work on your pitch(es) and/or perhaps meet with your group members.
Thanks, see you at the writing retreat, and let’s do this!
The Edinburgh Winter School Collaborator team
Especially:
Brittany – Grant Principal Investigator (PI) 🥟
Ziska – Research Assistant (RA) & Coordinator 🚀
Pawel – Tech Support 🌟