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Mr Oli Howson

Oli Howson

Profile summary

  • Central Academic Staff
  • Lecturer in Computing, C&C
  • Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics
  • School of Computing & Communications
  • oli.howson

Web links

Externally funded projects

VR in STEM Education
RoleStart dateEnd dateFunding source
Lead01 Jan 202231 Mar 2022EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council;University of Sheffield

Virtual Reality (VR) opens up opportunities in education that have not yet been fully explored. In this mini project I would like to purchase 3x Oculus Quest headsets, pre-configure them and send them to a number of STEM educators across Secondary and FE. The recipients will run through a range of: - Acclimatisation tasks - Robotics simulation tasks - Problem solving tasks - And finally will be involved in a VR group meeting. The recipients will be asked to complete a survey, the data from which (along with the recording of the meeting) will be analysed using mixed methods to: - Identify how easily novice users were able to begin using new methods. - Identify how able novice users were to make sure of intricate systems (robotics and problem solving) - Investigate the potential of online VR-based meetings. - Explore opportunities for the use of VR in the STEM classroom. As the project is set to run over up to 3-months, there will be the opportunity to run up to 8 cohorts for a total of 24 educators.

Publications

An exploration of the impact of augmented and Virtual Reality within compulsory education (2020)
Howson, Oli
In: Daniela, Linda ed. New Perspectives on Virtual and Augmented Reality: Finding New Ways to Teach in a Transformed Learning Environment. Perspectives on Education in the Digital Age (pp. 95-110)
ISBN : 9780367432119 | Publisher : Routledge | Published : Abingdon, UK

Leveraging Jupyter Notebooks in Assessment Development, Completion and Marking to Reduce Cognitive Load and Minimise Errors (2023)
Howson, Oliver
In : I-HE2023: Proceedings of the Innovating Higher Education Conference, (04-06 Oct 2023, Istanbul, Turkey) (pp. 11-20)

INSPIRE: Fourth Industrial Revolution Teaching in the Classroom (2022-03-03)
Howson, Oliver; Charlton, Patricia; Iniesto, Francisco and Holmes, Wayne
In : 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (2-5 Mar 2022, Providence, Rhode Island, USA)

Virtually Learning...Or Not? (2022)
Howson, Oliver
In : EDULEARN22 Proceedings (4-6 Jul 2022, Palma, Spain) (pp. 8614-8620)

INSPIRE: Fourth industrial revolution teaching in the classroom a multi-disciplinary collaboratively designed pilot project (2022)
Howson, Oliver; Charlton, Patricia; Iniesto, Francisco and Holmes, Wayne
In : 14th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (4-6 Jul 2022, Palma, Spain) (pp. 8604-8613)

Identifying the impact of using Augmented and Virtual Reality in educational contexts (2019-07-26)
Howson, Oliver and Gilardi, Marco
In : Twenty-sixth International Conference on Learning (24-26 Jul 2019, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom)

Aligning Competence Hierarchies with Bloom's Taxonomies: Changing the focus for computing education (2019)
Bowers, David; Petre, Marian and Howson, Oli
In : Koli Calling '19 Proceedings of the 19th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (21-24 Nov 2019, Koli, Finland)

Mathematical and Data Literacy: Competencies and curriculum implications at the intersection of mathematics, data science, statistics and computing (2023-09)
Smith, Cathy; Kathotia, Vinay; Ward-Penny, Robert; Howson, Oli and Wermelinger, Michel
The Royal Society

Best Practices in using Technological Infrastructures (2020-07)
Howson, Oliver; Adeliyi, Adeola; Willis, Alistair; Hirst, Tony; Charlton, Patricia; Gooch, Daniel; Rosewell, Jonathan; Richards, Mike; Wermelinger, Michel; Piwek, Paul; Savage, Simon; Lowndes, Charly; Thomas, Elaine and Smith, Andrew
The Institute of Coding

Analysis of accreditation approaches in the Computing sector (2019-07-15)
Bowers, David S. and Howson, Oliver
The Open University, Milton Keynes.