This year, Neil Brown and I are serving as program co-chairs of the new UK and Ireland Computing Education Research (UKICER) conference. It will be held at the University of Kent on 5-6th September 2019. The committee includes Janet Carter as conference chair, along with Sally Fincher, Quintin Cuttsand Steven Bradley. Steven has been running the Computing Education Practice conference at Durham for the past few years, which has grown impressively. We believe that there is a growing community of computing education researchers in the UK and Ireland, but we do not have a local conference to support this community’s growth. Our hope is that this sister conference to CEP will provide a useful outlet to share Irish and British computing education research, and encourage research collaborations.

The conference will run roughly from lunchtime on the 5th to lunchtime on the 6th, with some collaboration-building events beforehand and some workshops afterwards. We thus invite submissions of research papers (max 6 pages, ACM format), and proposals for 1-2 hour workshops, by the beginning of June. More details are available on the conference website. Please feel free to send any questions to [email protected] and please do share this news with anyone you think might be interested in submitting or attending. We hope to see a variety of researchers and educators for all age groups.