A Growth Engine for Europe

Wikibooks provides free, open-source and updatable content to aid students and teachers in learning. The A level Computing Wikibook was originally written in 2006 to provide an alternative resource for students in England who might not be able to afford supplementary texts for their school courses. Recently, the English Computing curriculum has undergone substantial changes, with many teachers unsure of new concepts and unable to find student-focused support material. Very often the descriptions online are not suitable for students or come at a price that many schools and students can’t afford. As Wikibooks has become an important resource for teachers, there has been a growing need to update the books for the new curriculum. With funding from Google’s Computer Science for High School (CS4HS) programme, the University of Roehampton has been organising hack weekends to support teachers and academics in updating textbook content. These hackathons bring authors together with graphical artists, Wiki markup experts and trained editors who create a resource that can compete with commercial products. Peter Kemp, CS4HS Project Lead and Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton claims, “Google CS4HS has given us the funds and the motivation to update our Wikibook project for a new generation of Computer Science students.”