Rate My Professor Daniel Hickmott

Dr. Daniel Hickmott is a Casual Academic and Casual Senior Research Assistant in the School of Education, College of Human and Social Futures, at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Education awarded in 2020 and a Bachelor of Software Engineering with Honours Class 1 completed in 2014, both from the University of Newcastle. He also possesses a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment from Forsythes Training (2024-2025). Hickmott's academic interests center on computing education, teacher professional learning, learning analytics, online learning, and serious games. His PhD thesis, "A Study of a Professional Learning Program for Primary School Teachers Implementing the New South Wales Science and Technology Syllabus," investigated the Coding in Stage 3 program, which he developed and evaluated to enhance K-6 teachers' coding knowledge, confidence, and curriculum integration.

In his career, Hickmott lectured in the Master of Education (Digital Technologies) at the University of Sydney from 2020 to 2022, aiding teachers in leading Digital Technologies curriculum implementation through the Australian Computing Academy. He contributed to projects such as Coding & STEM 4 Schools (2013-2019), preparing resources and coordinating professional learning workshops at the University of Newcastle; literacy serious games apps Apostrophe Power and Sentence Hero (2014-2016), where he applied analytics to player data; and currently, a 2025-2026 study designing inclusive, transparent learning analytics dashboards tested with students and teachers. Key publications include first-author journal articles "To Assess or Not to Assess: Tensions Negotiated in Six Years of Teaching Teachers about Computational Thinking" (Informatics in Education, 2018, co-authored with Elena Prieto-Rodriguez) and "A Scoping Review of Studies on Computational Thinking in K-12 Mathematics Classrooms" (Digital Experiences in Mathematics Education, 2018, co-authored with Elena Prieto-Rodriguez and Kathryn Holmes); conference papers "Constructionist Experiences in Teacher Professional Development: A Tale of Five Years" (Constructionism 2018) and "Building Apostrophe Power: Lessons Learnt for Serious Games Development" (Interactive Entertainment 2016); and co-authored works like "Exploring Play-Learners' Analytics in a Serious Game for Literacy Improvement" (Joint International Conference on Serious Games, 2016). His contributions have advanced computational thinking, digital literacy, and teacher capabilities in technology integration across primary and higher education contexts.