From Marco to Maria: Ten years of the Computing Education Practice Conference

There has been a relentless march towards research-focussed papers in Computing Education conferences, influenced by Valentine’s pejorative “Marco Polo” characterisation of practice papers. We argue that there is an important place for practice-focussed papers when presented in a format which provides careful contextual description, as exemplified by the work of seventeenth century ecologist Maria Sibyella Merian. Computing Education Practice (CEP) is a UK practice-based conference that has its tenth year in 2026. In this paper we discuss and describe the CEP reporting format, and review the character and contribution of the CEP series. We explore a) the structure and content of CEP papers in relation to papers at comparable conferences (Koli, ITiCSE and ICER) using Simon’s classification system; b) what kinds of institution are represented at CEP; and c) CEP’s influence on participants’ teaching,
through a (mostly) qualitative survey. We find that a) CEP papers are similar in scope, theme and context to other computing education conferences despite the nature of papers showing an expected and distinctive preponderance of reports; b) CEP is more representative of the full range of UK computing departments than comparator
conferences, when considering average student entry standards; and c) participants identify value in participation and discussions as well as some specific contributions of the publications. We champion the value of carefully constructed reports of practice in computing education.