This was the first time that ATSiP have had an event in Birmingham and we were certainly well looked after by the School of Social Sciences that included Psychology, Criminology and Sociology.

The Curzon Building near Millennium Point where the venue was to be located is an impressive new building just about 20min walk from the revamped New Street Station.

Approx. 40 delegates attended the meeting and also a number of vendors. When arriving on the Wednesday afternoon we had a meet and greet registration with coffee/tea and bespoke biscuits which made the ambience very congenital.

Our hosts were Ojay and Neale at BCU

The first talk was by Wakefield Morys-Carter from Oxford Brookes University on ‘Learning Analytics. Can we? Should we? This presentation was concerning using student behaviour to help predict learning outcomes, to help identify students who may withdraw and encourage behaviours that lead to higher performance. The use of VLEs and providing information about individual student’s performance seems a step in the right direction.

Boars Head Worlds Food Buffet a very good first night venue a short walk from the Perry Barr accommodation with many cultural cuisines to try

Thursday Morning we found that the Breakfast at 8am at the venue E-Syndicate appeared closed but fortunately we were rescued by the staff of the local cafe into the refectory that provided us with rapid full English or Continental (while it still exists?)

Next we had a fleet of taxis pick us up from the campus accommodation for a welcome coffee and freshly booked pastries at 9.30am. We were then welcomed by the HOD for Psychology Prof Craig Jackson who made us all feel at ease and at home in his work place.

The second talk was by Yiannis Argyropoulos from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh on An Introduction to AWK programming language.  We were informed that AWK is a powerful programming language when it comes to data manipulation, data extraction and reporting. It typically comes pre-installed with *nix systems but it can also be installed in Windows machines making it a highly portable language. In this presentation Yiannis  talked about the syntax and basic commands of awk (with examples) and how awk can be used in real life scenarios like sorting out email addresses from webpages which proved a useful tool.

A tour of the dept. took place next and we were divided into 2 groups and shown round by Neale and Ojay. The building is impressive with its own inbuilt coffee station and dedicated BPS Lab for those students on the accredited BSc Psychology degree course, CCTV lab too.

Next we had a lovely lunch in the dept followed by a photo shoot of delegates outside the building.

There was also the opportunity to meet the vendors and suppliers in the dept and networking opportunities to

Next on the programme talks was Richard  Plant The Black Box ToolKit Ltd

TTL event marking and timestamping activity on up to 48 sensors in EEG studies using the mBBTK. Following on from last year’s conference where we floated the concept of a new device to event mark and timestamp across a range of sensors in EEG studies we now have some hardware and software to talk about and hopefully demo. The mBBTK lets you monitor up to 48 sensors, e.g. screen areas, mics, audio pass-throughs, response pads etc. It records sensor timestamps in milliseconds and pairs any sensor to one or more TTL output lines from a total 24. Sensors can also be paired with a keyboard HID which 2 will send a standard keystroke into a PC as though a key had been pressed. Whenever an event occurs it is marked on your EEG trace and also independently timestamped enabling you to be confident of synchronization and timing accuracy.

A coffee break followed and then Dr Emma McDonald from BCU
She gave an interesting talk entitled Ninja cats, Pirates and Zombies: lessons learned from teaching statistics looking an engaging ways to teach stats to students. Teaching statistics is at the core of most psychology research methods courses and forms a substantial component of psychology degrees. However, it is often considered a thankless task by many staff, who find themselves in the unexpected position of confronting hard-wired, negative attitudes towards what the pedagogic literature terms troublesome knowledge (e.g. Meyer & Land, 2003). But is it possible to make the topic more pleasurable for both staff and students while improving theoretical understanding? In this workshop Emma discussed different methods that she has utilised in the classroom to improve the experience of both teaching and learning statistics and research methods, in particular the use of unconventional datasets, colourful examples and student-led seminars. Emma discussed the insights from the students regarding what they think about the methods used and go on to evaluate which methods have stood the test of time and contributed in their understanding and application of statistics for psychology.

The AGM followed the last talk which lasted about 75min.  Reports (Treasurer, Chair) and previous minutes from last year’s conference discussed.  AOB and next year’s conference venue highlighted.

The conference meal was at the Lost and Found in central Birmingham.  We had a special seating area in this very old Victorian building as a former banking hall with interesting bric-a-brac and a raised eating area so you can survey the multitude of mostly young-trendy drinkers below.

The next morning at 8am we had a better organised breakfast as the main part of the E-Syndicate was up and ready for action and therefore Full English was available and most delegates made it even if a few had ventured into the centre after the meal finished at the Lost and Found.

Taxis picked us up after breakfast to take us to the Curzon Building where we had a nice welcome cup of tea or coffee before starting the final talks of the conference. 

The Keith Nicholson Prize was awarded this year to the presentation by Noel Taylor on Qualtrics.

After the last talk we had lunch with those delegates not in a rush to leave for planes, trains and cars and took our farewells.

Peter Beaman