Phew! It’s been a while since my last post in October – all of a sudden, it was December, the holidays, the new year, and now it’s already February and Manchester is being covered in snow!

I’ve been quite busy with my research (it’s the final year of my PhD), and I’ve been spending a lot of time working on algorithms for some experiments, as well as improving my Java skills to implement them.

I also wrote a blog post for The Guardian recently to support their “Digital Literacy” campaign. They asked me to comment on the lack of girls and women in IT from a personal point of view:

[…] I have only vague memories of ICT classes in school, except for one lesson where we were assigned the task of formatting an Excel spreadsheet. I was about 13 years old, and one of the few girls in my class who not only knew how to use a computer, but even owned one.

Now, more than a decade later, I am studying for a PhD in computer science and spend my spare time organising technology-related workshops for girls and women from different age groups and backgrounds.

Needless to say that my ability to format Excel spreadsheets played only a minor role in my decision to study computing at university level. […]

To read the entire blog post, visit the Guardian’s Teacher Network blog!