In 2020, we conducted a qualitative study exploring a Graduate Apprenticeship (GA) in Software Engineering at the University of Glasgow, focusing on student experiences, institutional motivations, and employer perspectives. A key component of this work involved life story interviews with nine students, capturing their learning trajectories and sense-making of their experiences early in the program. Now that these students have completed their degrees, we conducted a follow-up study to examine their perspectives and pathways. Using a longitudinal narrative approach, we re-interviewed prior participants from the first GA cohort. Our study seeks to understand how these individuals reflect on their GA experiences, how their stories have changed over time, and how they situate their program participation within their broader professional and personal development. By analyzing these narratives, we explore the long-term impacts of apprenticeship-based education and contribute to the literature on work-based learning in computing education. This work also provides additional insight into the ways stories of educational experiences evolve over time.

Graduate and Degree Apprenticeships (G/DAs) are relatively new work-based learning (WBL) degree programs in the UK which were established with the aim "to meet key skills needs, enhance productivity, strengthen university and employer partnerships, and offer a new route into work". These programs have been growing in popularity in the UK in recent years. While work-based learning itself is not a novel concept and several countries in the international SIGCSE community offer WBL programs in higher education, formal degree programs remain rare. This work presents an exploration of some of the challenges and opportunities in running such programs in the UK as the programs became formalized. We sent an initial survey to all 61 institutions in the UK that offer G/DAs in computing. 18 institutions responded and we conducted in-depth follow-up interviews with representatives from 10 institutions. We report themes related to the kinds of students and employers participating in these programs, how the design of G/DAs differs from that of traditional degree programs, and differences between these programs that may not be initially apparent. These findings provide insights that can support educators interested in developing similar formal WBL programs.

Background and Context. The relationship between spatial skills and computing science success has been demonstrated at multiple institutions. ICER has reacted positively to two theories for why this relationship exists, by both Parkinson & Cutts and Margulieux. However, only limited work has been done to validate these theories, and more confirmatory research about the relationship between spatial skills and module grades in CS is necessary.

This Practice Work-in-Progress paper presents a work-based undergraduate degree program in Software Engineering, designed in consultation with industry. Work-based learning is often seen as a means of ensuring university graduates are equipped with the skills and knowledge required to succeed in the workplace. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which the program has prepared students for working in industry. To this end, the students were surveyed after they had completed their first semester, and returned to their workplace for two months. Qualitative analysis of survey data revealed the aspects of their first year courses that apprentices valued most in the workplace. These aspects included exposure to multiple programming languages and existing codebases, as well as knowledge of Software Engineering tools and practices. Underpinning many of the students’ responses, however, was the increased confidence that their university instruction afforded them in the workplace.

This Research Full Paper describes a case study of educators changing practice as a result of interactions with an open source software community. It examines an NSF-funded initiative designed to expose educators to humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) communities and, in turn, to support them in involving their students in these communities as part of their classroom experience. To date, more than 150 faculty from over 120 different institutions have participated in the initiative’s faculty development workshops. In this work, we conducted in-depth interviews with 24 workshop participants. The interviews explored how faculty had adopted HFOSS in the classroom, the hurdles and successes they encountered, and how their teaching had changed, among other questions. Some of the themes we identify in our data – obstacles to adoption, such as a lack of time, and the importance of the institutional context – confirm prior findings in the literature on pedagogical change. However, this work also identifies several additional nuances that have not previously been reported and emphasizes common aspects among educators who successfully adopted a practice.

This paper uses an approach that differs from conventional interview research to trace the individual trajectories of two computing graduates. In this approach, interviews are considered a dialogic process and analysis is a case-centred process that explores similarities and differences in participants' trajectories. This approach allows us to probe the experience and lasting value of computing education beyond graduation. In this extended analytic approach we expose participants' sense of professionalism and we connect this with the concept of accountable disciplinary knowledge (ADK). ADK has previously only been applied to students' experiences and identity formation at university. The approach taken in this work allows us to see the extension of ADK into the workplace.

In this research full paper, we present a study of a cohort of non-traditional students learning to program as part of an intercalated computer science year named Year in Computing at University of Kent, Canterbury in the UK. The study uses focus group interviews with students to explore their articulations and perceptions of learning to program. During the interviews, we used Bebras puzzles as a tool for students to reflect on their own experiences in learning to program. By observing the students working with the puzzle, some of the tacit information of problem-solving strategies became apparent. We see Bebras puzzles as a way to gain valuable insights that are not as easily available when relying on conventional self-reflection in a qualitative study. Another contribution grounded in this study is the proposal of a framework describing the students' developing mental models in the beginning of their studies. The results presented here are a first iteration in an ongoing endeavour of exploring students' development of mental models. We hope that these contributions will provide teachers and researchers with a new perspective for developing introductory programming curricula and to engage in further development of our framework.

The stories we tell ourselves and others - both as individuals and as a community - reflect how we make sense of our lives. Our work using narrative methods has explored how university graduates make sense of their learning experiences and how these fit within their wider learning trajectories. In this paper, we discuss work we conducted with a group of a dozen students who, when first interviewed, were in the second half of their undergraduate education at Olin College of Engineering. All twelve participants were re-interviewed four years later, after they had graduated, using the same narrative protocol that asked them to describe their learning 'life' as if it was a book, and to identify and describe individual chapters of their experience. The pairs of interviews were analysed with respect to their form and their content. In regard to form, a classification of these repeated stories is derived. Thematic analysis of the content examines a) how students come to study and practice computing and b) the continuing, and changing influence of a university education over time, as students construct an individual sense of coherence.

In this paper, we discuss students' expectations and experiences in the first term of the Year in Computing, a new programme for non-computing majors at the University of Kent, a public research university in the UK. We focus on the effect of students' home discipline on their experiences in the programme and situate this work within the context of wider efforts to make the study of computing accessible to a broader range of students.

Graduateness as a concept describes attributes that all graduates should have developed by the time they leave university. In my work, I take a different view and explore graduateness as constructed through graduates' individual narratives.

In this paper, we explore graduates' characterisations of their learning experiences at university and beyond. Using a narrative methodology, we elicited life stories from graduates of the School of Computing at the University of Kent. We initially review and situate our approach within the wide variety of existing narrative approaches. Then, we turn to an aspect of the student experience that struck us as particularly significant: the 'year in industry'. We discuss the accounts of ten participants who completed a year in industry and highlight their perspectives of the effect it had on them. Finally, we propose a narrative construction of the concept of graduateness -- of what it means to complete a university degree.

In my research, I employ a highly qualitative, narrative methodology to explore the sense students make of their own educational experiences within their wider learning trajectories. By taking such a holistic perspective on a Computing Education, I hope to be able to identify and distil aspects of successful Computing programs, whose effects may only emerge over time.

In this paper, we illuminate themes that emerged in interviews with participants in the major curriculum recommendation efforts: we characterize the way the computing community interacts with and influences these reports and introduce the term "pedagogic projection" to describe implicit assumptions of how these reports will be used in practice. We then illuminate how this perceived use has changed over time and may affect future reports.

In this study, we report on the student experience at Olin College, a small undergraduate university in the United States with an explicit mission to transform engineering education. We employ a highly narrative approach to situate students' individual experiences within their larger learning trajectories and use them as a lens through which we view the accounts of their time at college. We highlight a series of themes: from often successful, but traditional high school experiences to an academic dislocation in the first year in college that reinforces fundamentally different values of what it means to be an engineer. The resulting dissonance (and inherent wrestling) students experience as they adjust into an environment that values interdisciplinary activities and student autonomy emerged as a central theme of this study. We connect these themes to shifts in motivation and accountable disciplinary knowledge to reveal what it means for college students to `learn beyond success'.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has become an important segment of the computing industry and a source of innovation in software development. The open culture of FOSS projects where all project artifacts are accessible and communication is visible provides computing educators with an array of unique opportunities for student learning. However, FOSS projects can also present hurdles to instructors desiring to take advantage of these opportunities including the learning curve for FOSS culture, infrastructure and processes, difficulties in designing appropriate assignments, and more. This paper presents a model for faculty development based on experiences with prior academic and FOSS approaches to faculty development.

Many professors are reluctant to transform their teaching practices from "sage on the stage" to "guide on the side” for understandable reasons. Facilitating student work in a potentially unfamiliar setting has a steep learning curve and requires professors to relinquish control of their classrooms without assurance their career evaluations will benefit. However, professors who do transform their teaching practices continue to report exactly the same concerns - so how does the sage-to-guide shift occur? This work-in-progress paper describes early efforts in a grounded theory study whose initial participants are professors who have involved their classes in open software, hardware, and content communities, a choice which requires such a shift in teaching practices for successful student participation. Inspired by the radical transparency of the open communities our participants work with, the study itself is an open content project, creating a public compendium of teaching transformation stories that can be accessed by educators considering similar transformations to their own teaching practices.

Participating in free and open source (FOSS) software communities provides students with authentic learning while supplying instructors with a wide variety of educational opportunities including coding, testing, documentation, professionalism and more. However, instructors may be unfamiliar with how FOSS communities work and therefore may be reluctant to involve students in such communities. This workshop is a subset of material used in Red Hat's Professors' Open Source Summer Experience (http://communityleadershipteam.org/posse) workshop, now in its third year of successfully providing a ramp to FOSS projects for instructors. These instructors have demonstrated success in involving their students in FOSS communities where students have contributed code, interface design, and more. Intended audience: Computing educators at the college or high school level interested in involving students in open source software projects in any capacity (testing, coding, documentation, design, project management, observational shadowing of a large-scale project, etc). The workshop may also be of interest to pre-high school computing educators and members of the open source community. No experience with open source communities or contribution is necessary.

Involving students from a wide range of backgrounds in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) project communities gets them a hands-on, portfolio-building experience in the creation of a real-world project while simultaneously building their institution's public profile. The Teaching Open Source (http://teachingopensource.org) community is an emergent (3 year old) group working on scaffolding to bridge the cultural differences between academic and FOSS communities of practice. Join us to share questions, challenges, and triumphs of incorporating FOSS participation into existing and new curricula as well support resources for doing so. Alumni and current members of the POSSE (Professors' Open Source Summer Experience, http://communityleadershipteam.org/posse) will attend in mentorship roles. Faculty attendance at the SIGCSE 2010 BoF on Teaching Open Source (TOS) indicates that student involvement in FOSS projects is a teaching and learning approach of interest for many faculty members. The transparency of both artifacts and process make FOSS an attractive real-world experience that enhances peer learning and intrinsic motivation for a diversity of courses, from introductory, interdisciplinary, and non-major classes to software engineering core offerings and senior capstones. However, such student participation involves a significant learning curve and effort on the part of the faculty member, and support structures for faculty are still maturing. 2011-2012 marks the 3rd academic year the TOS community has explored this realm together, and the past year has seen the emergence of more best practices, support resources, and curricular material. Community members are starting to design cross-institutional research on the impact of FOSS participation on students. BoF attendees will be encouraged to ask questions, network, and take advantage of the TOS community as a support structure for their own courses and projects.

Software projects are frequently used to provide software engineering students with an understanding of the complexities of real-world software development. Free and Open Source Software projects provide a unique opportunity for student learning as projects are open and accessible and students are able to interact with an established professional community. However, many faculty members have little or no experience participating in an open source software project. In addition, faculty members may be reluctant to approach student learning within such a project due to concerns over time requirements, learning curve, the unpredictability of working with a "live" community, and more. This paper provides guidance to instructors desiring to involve students in open source projects.