Introducing 'PECS' - a new mailing list / community of practice for people involved in Public Engagement in Computer Science

New mailing list
PECS = for anyone involved in Public Engagement in Computer Science
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa-jisc.exe?A0=PECS

Paul Curzon and I are on a lovely EPSRC grant running over the next three years and he is one of five new "ICT Public Engagement Champions". One of the things we said we'd do in our application was create a community of practice (pragmatically = a mailing list) for people who do public engagement with computer science research, but we didn't want to restrict it just to academia or industry. 

Consequently the list is open to anyone who does computer science-related science communication, or public engagement with computing (and electronic engineering). 

There are loads of people who do this in the UK and beyond but I don't think we necessarily know who's doing what (or at least I don't, yet) and others might not know what we're* doing. So this list is kind of like a point of gravity to get us all to fall in together and learn from each other, celebrate fun things and highlight stuff that's coming up.

Note that messages to the PECS list are publicly archived (here's the privacy policy).

 

*Our project
We've been producing the free secondary schools magazine CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun) for over 15 years and send around 21,000 copies to 2,400+ subscribing UK schools and will produce a special issue on Diversity in Computing for this grant; there's also an accompanying website. We're also delighted to be able to expand our primary schools version ('A Bit of CS4FN') which we piloted thanks to internal funding from QMUL's Centre for Public Engagement and which we can now expand thanks to the EPSRC. Primary teachers teach the entire curriculum so these mini magazines are designed to be cross-curricular, and draw links between computing and other subjects. We also want to support teachers in championing computer science research and careers.

The PECS mailing list is part of our remit to embed public engagement in computer science research (both within our own department and elsewhere) and we already have an internal Teams group (called PEEECS, for PE in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science). I'm sorry about the acronyms ;)

We also run Teaching London Computing for teachers which has free classroom resources and we sometimes run workshops (supporting teachers who are newer to teaching programming).

Although this post is published on my personal blog I would like to acknowledge the EPSRC funding (grant number EP/W033615/1) which has allowed us to create and maintain the PECS 'space' :D