After the success of Edinburgh Winter School 2024, we decided to do it again in 2025. This time, a few things were a bit easier. For example, we started the planning and advertising process in September 2024, giving ourselves a realistic timeline until the event date on 8th January 2025. We also had a tested team, with colleagues from across university departments, all willing to help and experienced in their respective tasks. But, a few things were more challenging: we decided to hold the event in a different venue (Usher Building, which is home to quite a few members of the organising team, but is located further out of town), we opened many more slots for short and longer attendee talks (leading to more admin around talk submission, selection and delivery), and I personally had another large event scheduled for the day after the Winter School.
The team have gathered a lot of statistics and practical documents summarising how we organised the event, and what advice we would give to anyone wanting to organise something similar in the future. For example, we know that for in-person participation, 99 people said they were interested, 89 confirmed that they would attend, and 71 eventually attended the event. For online participation, 77 people said they were interested and 65 eventually attended (this includes a few people who were signed up to attend in person and switched to online). These numbers are useful to have because they help with planning things like the number of tables and seats to set, or the amount of catering that should be ordered. Being a bit of an obsessive planner, I do always worry that we will run out of chairs or sandwiches, or that we’ll be left with lots of food going to waste. But, I have been learning to let go and make estimates based on previous runs of the event (e.g. we ordered lunch for 80 people, but the drinks reception was estimated as 60, as we knew from last year that quite a few people needed to head home early). If you are interested in getting more of our estimates and advice, please feel free to reach out at pairprogramming@ed.ac.uk.
A humbling experience for me as one of the organisers has been sending the invitations to keynote speakers. As I become more senior and more busy, I definitely expect “No” to be everyone’s default answer. Imagine my surprise and absolute delight when the three keynote speakers I approached, Greg Wilson, Yanina Bellini Saybene, and Felienne Hermans, accepted our invite. Felienne even offered to attend the conference in person (granted, it would have been a much more difficult task for Greg and Yanina, who are based in Canada and Argentina). Both keynotes were excellent and the participant feedback suggests that they were a highlight for the participants – many feedback comments mentioned Felienne’s engaging delivery style and the important message in her talk (there is no merit in making things difficult; we should be making programming easier for our students!).
Another fantastic part of the Winter School has been the groundwork that we have done for putting together an edited book about teaching programming across disciplines. We encouraged conference participants to propose topics for chapters that they would like to contribute to the book. Putting these on a big whiteboard (and in the chat for online participants) meant that anyone could also add their name to a chapter already proposed. We now have 48 book chapter suggestions and will be working with all authors to make them reality. Over the next 2 years, we will facilitate writing retreats, provide editing support and spread the word about the book, so that the programming education community can come together in creating this resource. For more information about the book (and to submit your chapter ideas), please check out https://pairprogramming.ed.ac.uk/book/.
