The Exploring Physical Computing in Schools (EPICS) project is a UK-wide, five-year, longitudinal, mixed-methods project investigating primary school pupils’ attitudes and beliefs about physical computing and teacher physical computing pedagogy.
Physical computing involves combining programmable hardware with software to create an interactive, physical system that senses and responses to the real world. An example of such a device is the BBC micro:bit. Through the BBC micro:bit – the next gen campaign, over 500,000 micro:bits have been distributed to UK schools. Previous research has found that the micro:bit is beneficial for young people, in terms of their motivation, creativity, and programming skills. Young people find the micro:bit engaging and its tangibility allows ease of use. However, little is known as to whether initial experiences with the micro:bit translate into long-term impacts on young people’s attitudes and beliefs such as confidence and creativity. Additionally, research has not explored in depth primary school teachers’ experiences of teaching physical computing and their pedagogical practices.
Our EPICS research project aims to investigate these areas. How does engagement with physical computing over time (for example, through using the BBC micro:bit), support the development of pupils’ interests and attitudes? How do primary school teachers develop pedagogical strategies for teaching with physical computing? We’re specifically looking at young people’s digital creativity, computing self-efficacy, and socio-technological agency. We are also investigating how pupils’ teachers and parents might influence the development of their digital capital through such physical computing experiences. We are also interested in whether there are any gender differences in how pupils engage with physical computing.
The project began in March 2024 and will run until February 2029. The project is UK-wide, and we are working with schools in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We are working with a smaller group of primary schools over a five-year period, and a larger group of primary and secondary schools at intermittent stages.
We have started working with a small group of children who were 8 or 9 years old when the project started in 2024 (Year 4 in England and Wales, Primary 5 in Scotland and Northern Ireland). We have been interviewing them each year to find out how their interests and attitudes develop over the five years of our project. The research also involves engagement with their teachers and parents through yearly interviews.
We are also surveying a wider group of primary and secondary schools in the UK to investigate how representative the children’s attitudes and beliefs are of pupils more generally, whether schools’ use of physical computing changes over time, and how teachers use pedagogical strategies for teaching physical computing. UK-wide surveys from pupils and teachers will be used to collect this data in 2024, 2026 and 2028.
We have completed the first two years of data collection for our project. In the first year of the project in 2024, we worked with 19 schools across the UK where we conducted 43 focus groups with 232 children aged 8-9 years old, interviewed 23 teachers, and observed 19 micro:bit lessons. We also administered a wider quantitative survey that reached 523 pupils and 99 teachers, to situate the findings from the qualitative interviews.
For the second year of our project in 2025, we worked with 16 schools (due to attrition) where we interviewed a subset of those children individually alongside their parents, this resulted in 93 child-parent interviews. We also interviewed their teachers, which included either their new class teachers or their computing teacher who we had interviewed in the first year of the project. We interviewed 24 teachers and observed 19 micro:bit lessons. We didn’t administer a survey in this year of the project.
We are currently collecting data for the third year of the project in 2026, where we hope to continue working with many of the children we’ve already been speaking to, as well as their teachers and parents. We’re also administering another survey where we hope to reach as many teachers and pupils as possible.
Our data collection and analysis is well underway, and whilst our project is ongoing here are a few overarching results:
We are grateful to the generous donation provided by the Micro:bit Educational Foundation, the BBC, and Nominet, for allowing us to carry out this research.
Sentance, S., & Durk, J. (2024). Exploring Physical Computing In Schools: Designing a Longitudinal Study. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Informatics in Schools: Situation, Evolution, and Perspectives (ISSEP ’24). ISSEP, 142–145.
Durk, J., & Sentance, S. (2025). A positive and inclusive classroom experience: primary school teachers’ perspectives of physical computing. In Proceedings of the 24th Interaction Design and Children (pp. 1146-1150).
Philbin, C.A., Durk, J., & Sentance, S. (2026). Adapting the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking for Physical Computing in Primary Schools
Sentance, S. and Durk, J., (2026). `Let’s learn together!’: developing PCK for physical computing in primary schools. ITICSE 2026. (will be available 13th July)
Kalelioglu, F., & Sentance, S. (2020). Teaching with physical computing in school: the case of the micro:bit. Education and Information Technologies, 25(4), 2577-2603.
Sentance, S., Waite, J., Yeomans, L., & MacLeod, E. (2017, November). Teaching with physical computing devices: the BBC micro:bit initiative. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Primary and Secondary Computing Education (pp. 87-96). (Open-access author copy)
Sentance, S., Waite, J., Hodges, S., MacLeod, E., & Yeomans, L. (2017, March). “Creating Cool Stuff” Pupils’ Experience of the BBC micro:bit. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE technical symposium on computer science education (pp. 531-536). (Open-access author copy)