Home Life
I live in Cambridge England. I have been here since 1996. I have a nice husband, Simon, and two great kids, Ellen and Luke.
Work
Workwise, my two main loves are mathematics and computer science, and I enjoy teaching both. The thing that ties these together, to my mind, is the use of logic and reasoning to solve problems of various kinds.
I have a bachelor's degree in maths and a PhD in computer science. My PhD thesis was in a fairly mathematical area: automated proof. After getting my PhD I worked as a post-doc at the University of Cambridge for four years, and then as a software engineer for 8 and a half years. I lost my software engineering job in 2009 when my company went belly-up in the recession. For the past 3 years I have been doing quite a bit of small-group and one-on-one teaching: supervising University of Cambridge computer science undergraduates, and doing A-level mathematics tutoring. I have recently been doing some contract work, first for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, helping out with the educational side of things, then doing some technical writing (writing the user manual for the Gertboard, a GPIO expansion board for the Raspberry Pi).
As a computer scientist whose two kids are in primary school, I have become interested in what sorts of computing-related things primary school students can learn. I have started teaching some Scratch lessons for my daughter's class, and I have been having lots of fun writing Scratch programs and coming up with projects involving Scratch, Lego WeDo, and the Picoboard
