Career Summary
Biography
Daniel Hickmott is a Higher Degree by Research (HDR) candidate and Research Assistant in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His research interests include the integration of digital technologies in K-12 education and adult learning, with a particular focus on these research topics:
- Supporting teachers learning coding and computational thinking
- Developing and evaluating serious games for learning
Daniel's HDR project involves the research and development of approaches for Teacher Professional Learning for the Digital Technologies curriculum. This project commenced in 2016 and is supervised by Professor John Fischetti, Dr Elena Prieto-Rodriguez and Mr Andrew Lyell.
Daniel completed his Bachelor of Engineering (Software), Honours Class 1 degree at the University of Newcastle in 2014. During 2012 to 2014, he worked as an undergraduate Software Engineer while completing his studies. From 2013 to the present, he has assisted in the organisation and running of the University of Newcastle’s Computer Science for Schools workshops, which provide two days of free training in coding and computational thinking to primary and secondary school teachers.
During 2015, Daniel worked as a Research Assistant on a project that involved the development and evaluation of two mobile gaming apps, titled Apostrophe Power and Sentence Hero, that were designed to help students improve their literacy skills. He was also awarded a Summer Research scholarship 2016 under supervision of Dr Shamus Smith. This summer research project involved the transformation, visualisation and analysis of game logs captured in the evaluation of Apostrophe Power.
Keywords
- computing education
- serious games
Publications
For publications that are currently unpublished or in-press, details are shown in italics.
Journal article (2 outputs)
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| 2018 |
Hickmott D, Prieto-Rodriguez E, Holmes K, 'A Scoping Review of Studies on Computational Thinking in K 12 Mathematics Classrooms', Digital Experiences in Mathematics Education, 4 48-69 (2018) [C1]
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| 2018 |
Hickmott D, Prieto-Rodriguez E, 'To assess or not to assess: Tensions negotiated in six years of teaching teachers about computational thinking', Informatics in Education, 17 229-244 (2018) [C1] Coding and computational thinking have recently become compulsory skills in many school systems globally. Teaching these new skills presents a challenge for many teachers. A notab... [more] Coding and computational thinking have recently become compulsory skills in many school systems globally. Teaching these new skills presents a challenge for many teachers. A notable example of professional development designed using Constructionist principles to address this challenge is ScratchEd. Upon reflecting on her experiences designing and running ScratchEd, Karen Brennan identified five tensions faced by professional development providers, and proposed that these tensions could be used for scrutinising and critiquing professional development. In this paper we analyse, through the lens of Brennan's tensions, the process we have followed to design, evaluate and improve professional development. We argue that while we have experienced the same tensions, the extent to which we assess learning is a new tension that extends those identified by Brennan. There are strong reasons to assess teachers' knowledge, however, quantitative measures of learning could be at odds with Constructionism: as Papert argued in Mindstorms, constructionist educators should study their learning environments as anthropologists. Consequently, we have called this new tension the tension between anthropology and assessment.
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Conference (8 outputs)
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| 2019 |
Prieto-Rodriguez E, Holmes K, Hickmott D, Berger N, 'Using Coding to Teach Mathematics: Results of a Pilot Project', Using Coding to Teach Mathematics: Results of a Pilot Project, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia (2019) [E1]
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| 2018 |
Hickmott D, Prieto-Rodriguez E, 'Constructionist Experiences in Teacher Professional Development: A Tale of Five Years', http://www.constructionism2018.fsf.vu.lt/file/repository/Proceeding_2018_Constructionism.pdf, Vilnius, Lithuania (2018) [E1]
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| 2017 |
Hickmott D, 'Developing Teachers As Computational Participants', PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2017 ACM CONFERENCE ON INTERNATIONAL COMPUTING EDUCATION RESEARCH (ICER 17), Tacoma, WA (2017)
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| 2016 |
Prieto-Rodriguez E, Hickmott D, 'Preparing teachers for the Digital Technologies Curriculum: Preliminary results of a pilot study', Constructionism in Action 2016: Conference Proceedings, Bangkok, Thailand (2016) [E1]
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| 2016 |
Smith SP, Hickmott D, Southgate E, Bille R, Stephens L, 'Exploring play-learners analytics in a serious game for literacy improvement', Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (2016) [E1] The collection and analysis of analytics incorporated into serious games provides researchers with objective data on player behavior related to serious game design elements and le... [more] The collection and analysis of analytics incorporated into serious games provides researchers with objective data on player behavior related to serious game design elements and learning. Such analytics offer insights about play-learners engagement that is not possible to capture through traditional techniques. Visualization of learning behavior data can allow for a comparison between the pedagogical intent of the game design and the play-learners actual behavior within the serious game. This paper describes the use of game-play logs to identify pathways through gaming content in a serious game app for literacy improvement. The paper describes the technical aspects of processing game-play logs and their transformation into visualizations, and considers how these visualizations can be used to explore play-learner behavior in relation to the pedagogical intent of activities embedded in the serious game app.
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| 2016 |
Hickmott D, Smith SP, Bille R, Burd E, Stephens L, Southgate E, 'Building apostrophe power: Lessons learnt for serious games development', ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (2016) [E1] There is increasing interest in the application of serious games for learning. Growth in the take-up of digital devices, e.g. smartphones and tablets, and their use for gaming pro... [more] There is increasing interest in the application of serious games for learning. Growth in the take-up of digital devices, e.g. smartphones and tablets, and their use for gaming provides new opportunities for mobile learning (m-learning). A serious game m-learning app for improving adult learners' apostrophe usage, called Apostrophe Power, has been developed. The research team, which consisted of software engineers and educationalists, encountered a number of discipline spanning issues while designing and developing this m-learning app. This paper overviews the issues encountered, the recommendations from recent literature and how the issues were ultimately addressed, exemplified in a case study. These lessons learnt offer insight for serious game development and highlight practical solutions for m-learning apps involving interdisciplinary teams.
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| 2015 |
Southgate E, Smith S, Stephens L, Hickmott D, Bille R, 'Interdisciplinary opportunities and challenges in creating m-learning apps: Two case studies', Ascilite 2015 Conference Proceedings, Perth, WA (2015) [E1]
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| 2015 |
Smith SP, Hickmott D, Bille R, Burd E, Southgate E, Stephens L, 'Improving undergraduate soft skills using m-learning and serious games', Proceedings of 2015 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering, TALE 2015, Zhuhai, China (2015) [E1]
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Software / Code (4 outputs)
| Year | Citation | Altmetrics | Link | ||
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| 2016 |
Smith S, Southgate E, Bille R, Hickmott D, Stephens E, 'Sentence Hero (Android)', 1.6.2, Google, Google Play App Store (2016)
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| 2016 |
Smith S, Southgate E, Hickmott D, Bille R, Stephens E, 'Sentence Hero App (iOS)', 1.0, iTunes App Store (2016)
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| 2015 |
Smith S, Southgate E, Stephens L, Bille R, Hickmott D, Burd E, 'Apostrophe Power App (Android)', 2.0, Google, Google Play (2015) [G1]
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| 2015 |
Smith S, Southgate E, Stephens E, Bille R, Hickmott D, 'Apostrophe Power App (iOS)', 1.0, Apple, iTunes App Store (2015) [G1]
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