In contrast with other vocational disciplines, such as law, architecture and medicine, computer science is a young, emerging discipline. The development of new technologies and methods, which are used to teach the skills and knowledge that computing students require, are informed by our research on how current students engage with the curriculum.

For this research, we decided to look at the curriculum through a different lens and in doing so, developed a set of complimentary methods and instruments to help us investigate student practices in disparate parts of the computer science curriculum.