Professor Claire Lucas

Professor of Engineering Teaching and Learning, King’s College London

Claire is a Professor of Engineering Teaching and Learning, she is the Deputy Head of Department (Education) in the Department of Engineering at King’s College London, where she leads Engineering Education research and implementation. Her team brings together a diverse range of disciplinary and cultural backgrounds and experiences.

 Our research revolves around the reimagining of General Engineering as a multi-disciplinary approach which emphasises domains over traditional disciplines and is underpinned by scaffolded transversal skill development. We aim to transform our pedagogy from ways of knowing and doing to ways of thinking and becoming. Claire’s personal research interests are gathered around defining and improving the Engineering Profession for all and in the definition and assessment of behaviour and competencies of Engineers, learning from other disciplines and how industrial frameworks can be applied in Engineering Education.

Claire is a fellow of the IMechE and a Senior Fellow in HE. She was the deputy chair of the 2022 QAA Subject Benchmark Statement.  She is an experienced academic accreditor for the IET and a member of the Academic Accreditation Committee.

Claire was named one of the top 50 women in Engineering for her work in Engineering Education in 2020, and she was awarded the Women’s Engineering Society Prize and the IET’s Young Women Engineer of the Year in 2019.  

Developing a practical pedagogy for Engineering 

In traditional Blooms taxonomy - a model of learning is established in which students need to progress through knowledge and understanding before they can begin to apply and create. In many institutions this taxonomy is ubiquitous being embedded in teaching and learning vocabulary for module approval and resulting in course structures which promote knowledge of Engineering theory above practical and creative skills. In this talk Professor Claire Lucas will explore alternative pedagogies which support practical and experiential learning and describe how King’s College London developed a practical create-first pedagogy with emerging benefits for student skills. Claire will explain how the identification of non-functional learning outcomes brings in a dimension of ‘becoming’ and more adequately describes the educational journey that Engineering students undertake. Finally, Claire will describe how student behaviour can be used as a marker for skill and competency development and how new frameworks are emerging for measuring and assessing behaviour.  

Dr. Brett A. Becker

Assistant Professor, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin

Brett is Assistant Professor at University College Dublin in the School of Computer Science and has been researching and lecturing Computing for 17 years. Brett came into Computer Science at the undergraduate level via Mechanical Engineering and Physics before completing an MSc in Computational Science and then a PhD in Heterogeneous Parallel Computing, after which he completed an MA in Higher Education. 

His research area is computing education, focusing on the psychology of programming, programming error messages, novice programmer behaviour and generative AI in education. He is currently the Vice-Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), is serving on the Steering Committee for the CS 2023 ACM/IEEE Computer Society/AAAI International Task Force for the revision of Computer Science Curricula 2013, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computing Education, and author of a school-level textbook aligned with the Irish Computer Science curriculum. He is also on the Steering Committee of several conferences including the ACM Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) conference, the ACM Global Computing Education (CompEd) conference, and the UK & Ireland Computing Education Research (UKICER) conference. 

In 2020 he was awarded a National Forum Teaching and Learning Research Fellowship, Ireland’s most prestigious national individual teaching and learning awards in higher education. Brett is a Professional Member of ACM, SIGCSE SIGCAS, and a member of IEEE-CS and a Senior Member of IEEE.

Generative AI in Engineering Education Practice 

Generative AI has captured the imagination of millions and at the same time threatens to be one of the biggest disruptors to education the world has seen, particularly given that the pace of adoption has been much faster than other education-changing technologies such as the PC and the internet. Much attention has been put on topics such as assessment and academic integrity, in addition to generating content such as essays or computer programs. Generative AI has also demonstrated utility in software engineering, helping developers generate and test code quickly and efficiently as well as adding new functionality to tools such as Integrated Development Environments, exemplified by GitHub Copilot. However, the potential to significantly change educational practice in various engineering disciplines has received arguably less attention. This is likely due to complexity – teaching and learning necessarily involves humans, and it takes time and experience to find what works and what doesn’t. This talk explores the challenges and opportunities involved in leveraging Generative AI as a catalyst for positive change in engineering education practice with the goal of best preparing students for their future careers.