Eight years ago, Dr Dean Mohamedally, principal teaching fellow at University College London's computer science department, launched a new initiative aimed at ridding computer science programmes of fiction. "It's called the Industry Exchange Network (or IXN): it's a teaching methodology we developed with UCL and Microsoft, whereby we help students to engage with real-world problem-solving," Mohamedally explains. "Computer-science teaching across the country is basically about teaching maths, with very little implementation and activities in the real world. So we set about removing fiction from syllabuses. For instance, if students are learning about data, we give them some synthetic sample data and get them to clean it, make it ready, and see what happens when they use it in a machine learning environment."