Glenn Strong's Homepage

Photograph of the author
Photograph of the author and a Mr Man book

I am an assistant professor in computer science in the School of Computer Science in Trinity College.

Contact

Phone:+353 1 896 3629
Office: SLS 4.15
Postal address: School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland
Schedule meeting By email

Find more about contact information for me.

Research

I am a member of the Software Performance and Correctness research group here in TCD and of the the Centre for Research in I.T. and Education.

Some recent Publications are here.

Pytch

I am Principal Investigator on the Pytch project. We aim to smooth the transition from 'beginner' programming environments (especially Scratch) to Python. Pytch is funded by Science Foundation Ireland's Discover programme.

MIT's Scratch is very widely used to introduce young people to the ideas of programming. The learner writes code for sprites by visually clicking together blocks like go forward 10 steps. This avoids all problems with syntax, students can concentrate on the interesting parts of making their project.

Once a student gets proficient with Scratch, a common next step is Python, which is also very widely used in education as well as in industry. Python is a big leap from Scratch, though, because the student has to make multiple leaps in one go. They have to correctly type their code into an editor or IDE, getting all details of the syntax right. They have to deal with what happens when the syntax is not right (making sense of error messages). At the same time, they also have to leave behind the Scratch world of sprites, costumes, sounds, events such as when this sprite clicked scripts, and so on.

Pytch is intended as a bridge between these two worlds. It has Scratch's learner-friendly sprites, event-driven scripts, graphics, sounds, etc., while introducing the student to the idea of writing textual Python code instead of dragging and dropping blocks. In this way, they keep all the knowledge, intuition and skills they've built up with Scratch, and can focus on the task of learning the Python language.

OurKidsCode

I am the design lead for the SFI Discover OurKidsCode project which supports parents and guardians who want to engage their primary-school children's interest and activity in computing. The project designs, develops, and delivers creative computing workshops for families throught Ireland.

Teaching

I have some final year projects on offer (see the projects page). In my experience many of the best projects come from ideas that the student is passionate about, so if you have a project idea that you want to discuss please get in touch.

My teaching commitments in the 2023-2024 academic year are:

I've taught on several different programmes over the years, modules include:

Non-academic

Some photographs on Glass, and older ones on Flickr.

I am involved with the Irish Free Software Organisation.