Generative AI is a recent breakthrough in AI. While it has become a hot topic in computing education research (CER), much of the recent research has focused on e.g. issues of plagiarism or academic integrity. One problem spot with Generative AI is its susceptibility to various kinds of algorithmic bias. In this study, we collected data from an introductory computing course, where students experimented with text-to-image generative models and reflected on their generated image sets, in terms of biases, related harms, and possible fixes. Data were collected in Fall 2023 (pilot data in Fall 2022). Data included reports from 163 students. The results show (1) a variety of bias types observed by students related to gender, ethnicity, age, as well as a variety of bias types not observed by students, (2) two major types of attributions for the source of bias: bias caused by biases in the society and bias caused by data or algorithms, and (3) a number of potential harms associated with the biases, as well as attributions of those harms in specific contexts and use cases.

Preparing future graduates for the workplace should involve linkage with industry. Ultimately, students gain valuable insight into real-life projects, preparing them for future careers. However, universities in some developing countries lag in their initiatives to promote industry-academia collaboration. In this paper, we explore how to strengthen academic efforts at the University of Namibia (UNAM) with the assistance of industry in Namibia. In the study, we analyse: 1) current practices of industry collaboration worldwide published in ACM and IEEE digital library through a scoping review, and 2) students' capstone projects conducted in the final year of the Bachelor of Science (Honors) in the computing discipline in 2020 - 2022 at UNAM. The analysis from the scoping review found six (6) different University-Industry Collaboration initiatives employed in universities worldwide. Additionally, the review of current students' theses indicates that they are not aligned with all four key industries in Namibia: Mining, Tourism, Fisheries, and Agriculture. Hence, we contextualised the analysis by reflecting upon the economic drivers and demands of the country. The preliminary outcomes of this study allowed us to propose the incorporation of the Conceive, Design, Implement, and Operate model in the computing degree programme that UNAM can adopt in developing an effective curriculum that aligns with the demands of the key relevant industries in Namibia. The aim is to support the development of new talent that will promote the country's economic growth. Reflecting on this process can also benefit other universities in developing countries by assisting them in contextualising their curricula and addressing their local and national requirements.

IEEE/ASEE Frontiers in Education turned 50 at the 2020 virtual conference in Uppsala, Sweden. This paper presents an historical retrospective on the first 50 years of the conference from a scientometric perspective. That is to say, we explore the evolution of the conference in terms of prolific authors, communities of co-authorship, clusters of topics, and internationalization, as the conference transcended its largely provincial US roots to become a truly international forum through which to explore the frontiers of educational research and practice. The paper demonstrates the significance of FIE for a core of 30% repeat authors, many of whom have been members of the community and regular contributors for more than 20 years. It also demonstrates that internal citation rates are low, and that the co-authoring networks remain strongly dominated by clusters around highly prolific authors from a few well known US institutions. We conclude that FIE has truly come of age as an international venue for publishing high quality research and practice papers, while at the same time urging members of the community to be aware of prior work published at FIE, and to consider using it more actively as a foundation for future advances in the field.

In this Full Paper, we report our experiences of teaching AI in a Namibian university in collaboration with a Finnish university and a few companies. Within the Computing Education Community, only a minority of research reports have experience teaching Artificial Intelligence (AI), and very little research has been conducted on teaching and learning AI in Africa. Given the high importance and impact of AI, this is alarming. Learning and teaching AI in an African higher education setting provides unique challenges compared to the standardized approach in the Global North. Our undergraduate course in AI was carried out in a novel way that emphasized the creative application of AI to meet the requirements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). We chose an approach that helps Computer science graduates to explore and get inspired by the opportunities of AI at the ground.

Work in Progress: In this paper we outline our initial findings on the potential of state-of-the-art immersive telepresence to support the practical and collaborative group work element in our remotely taught international degree programmes, specifically a Software Engineering Masters degree. Whilst we adopt widely used distance learning approaches generally, the challenge remains in supporting live synchronous practical sessions that depend heavily, on one hand, on the expertise of the educator and their presence in the shared learning environment, and on the other hand, the students' active engagement within teams partially distributed physically. Any technical progress in improving the "sense of presence" can radically renew our conceptions of (distance) teaching and learning, maybe also in terms of the 21st century skills or even those that we are not yet aware of. The question to address is that if sufficiently high-fidelity, and unintrusive, immersive capture technology is used then how could this be game changing in this area? Previous work using similar immersive technology has failed to achieve the level of quality or scope necessary, however, the past 4 years have seen significant progress in the hardware and algorithms required. To support our degree programmes we have designed and developed a custom live 3D capture system for a higher fidelity immersive experience targeting small groups of 2-6 people collaborating both locally and remotely. Here we will present the system and scope out some of the initial plausible affordances for education through the Conceive, Design, Implement, Operate (CDIO)-model. We focus on the affordances offered by the technology to support the learning of the much needed competences of communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity which are very challenging to enhance by conventional, content delivery oriented distance learning approaches.

This full paper presents results of a model developed using early assessment tasks as predictors to identify at-risk students. To date several studies have been conducted to identify and retain at-risk students in computer science courses. However, both researchers and teachers have long sought to understand early warning signs for identifying at-risk students. While coursework-based predictive models have been developed, they need further investigation, due to inconsistencies in a range of identified factors and techniques employed. This paper presents a classification tree analysis (manually created) and a Random forest classification-based predictive model that uses two variables to predict student performance in introductory programming. Visualisation of the decision tree results is employed as early warning signs for instructors to assist students who identified as at-risk. Data for the formative assessment tasks in the first two weeks of the semester was used for model development, validation and testing. The overall prediction accuracy of the model was 60%. The results of this study showed that it is possible to predict 77% of students that need support, as early as Week 3, based on student performance in continuous formative assessment tasks in a 12-week introductory programming course. Moreover, our classification tree analysis revealed that students who secured less than or equal to 25% in formative assessment tasks in the first two weeks are unlikely to attend or indeed fail the final exam. Additionally, the results provide useful insights for early interventions, to prevent attrition and failure and to increase student retention and student success.

This Full Paper in the Research-category presents our initial findings in regards of students' implicit theories. Beliefs that people associate to themselves, often called implicit theories, self-theories, or mindsets, are a fundamental source of bias in human thinking. Research shows that implicit theories radically shape human thinking, behaviour, and progress. In the domain of education, implicit theories have significant associations to academic performance. In social domains, implicit theories are associated with development of social and soft skills, and groupwork behaviour. This article reviews the most significant research on implicit theories in educational and social domains, and shows significant research gaps in computing education. This article also summarises our previous findings, and presents new results from a sample of n =39 second year CS or computer engineering (CE) students in University of Turku, Finland, Department of Future Technologies. We investigated students' implicit theories and related association with academic achievement in first CS courses. Contrary to a lot of research, but in line with our own previous findings, we found that fixed implicit theories were connected with academic achievement. However, more data is needed to add reliability and confirm the results either way. The implications of implicit theories to development of soft skills are discussed, and a future research agenda is laid out.

There is strong evidence of the impact of self-theories to students' academic achievement and behavior in many domains of education, including CS. However, the research on self-theories in CSE are far from conclusive. In this research, we studied 1st year CS and CE students' self-theories and looked at associations to academic achievement in their first courses, as well as the students' conceptualisations of intelligence. Contradictory to previous research, students with a fixed view on intelligence received the best exam scores. Students' conceptualisations of intelligence were found to lean towards cognitive g-theories of intelligence. These initial findings show a number of crucially important future research directions in relation to self-theories, soft skills development, and academic achievement in CS studies.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) needs to transform from an information society that consumes information technologies into a knowledge economy that creates technologies. Key domains for transformation include computer science education, research and development. The lack of research culture and support for research activities often results in low research outcomes, and slows down the development of innovative and independent thinkers and problem solvers. To increase research capacities, we have launched a doctoral level computer science research training program between the College of Business Education (CBE), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and the University of Eastern Finland (UEF), School of Computing. This paper discusses the preliminary experiences of planning and setting up that program.

One-to-one computing is an active and widely researched topic in educational technology. Its benefits include, for instance, easily up datable material base, anywhere-anytime learning, adaptability, and simulated experiments in science. The use of one-to-one computing in a developing country context has recently become an active research topic. However, the materialization of the educational benefits requires proper contextualization regarding the necessary pedagogical, organizational, institutional, and other types of adaptation. This paper presents preliminary results from an action research study in a primary school in rural Tanzania. In that study, the utilization of one-to-one computing in a combination with modern pedagogical approaches to teach ICT and health care topics was studied.

One of the most debated areas of computer science education is how to arrange programming courses. One of the debates is concerned with the amount of guidance a learning environment should grant to the learner. This research study reports on development and testing of a model where students work on their homework under guidance, facilitated by active student-teacher collaboration, continuous feedback, and student support. While qualitative results, observations, and student feedback about the intervention were exclusively positive, controlled experiment showed no significant advantage over the control group. This paper reports the results of the experiment described above, and suggests ten hypotheses for further research.

This paper focuses on understanding and developing learning environments for computer science education. We present two models that we have successfully used in European and African contexts. The first model, Computer Science Learning Environments (CSLE), presents seven dimensions of computer science courses, which should be considered in learning environment design for computer science. The second model, Investigative Learning Environment (ILE), presents an action plan model, inspired by action research, for combining educational research and computer science teaching. In the empirical section we outline two case studies where these models were used to design and implement computer science learning environments in two different learning contexts. In the first case in University of Helsinki, Finland, we developed and studied a method of learning-by-inventing in a robotics programming course. That course was designed around problem discovery and inventing, and it employed LEGO® Mindstorms robots. In the second case in Tumaini University, Tanzania, we designed an environment for studying and improving introductory programming courses. Both models showed to be useful for designing, implementing, developing, and analyzing the courses in both learning contexts.

Despite much public discussion about the importance of creativity and innovation-friendly teaching in Finnish higher education, the impact of the general opinion on actual teaching practices has been limited. In the Finnish computer science education the teaching mostly follows a pattern of lectures, fixed exercise sets, and exams. With this article we want to open a discussion about possibilities of enhancing the learning environment by focusing on creative problem solving. We will present results from two research experiments in which we aimed to provide computer science students with a practically oriented learning environment with an explicit intention of supporting the creative work of students. There exists a vast amount of scientific theory about creativity, yet it is unclear on how to turn that theory into practice. Thus, our main interest was to find ways of applying creativity theory in practice in the context of computer science education. Our research experiments consist of a practically oriented computer science course, where LEGO®Mindstorms robots were used as the platform for the student work. Methodological tools used in this study included content analysis of student products, observations from our learning sessions and semi-structured interviews with the students. The course was organised two times: the first time was in spring 2009 and the second in spring 2010. The total number of attending students was 72. In this article we argue that our approach of providing a creativity-supporting practical computer science course was a success. We gained a lot of ideas on how to support creativity, the students were clearly motivated, and they began to learn a new kind of experimental working style. The robotics kit seemed to work well both as a trigger for motivation and as a platform to support experimental learning, enhancing students’ creativity and working style. In our opinion these findings are of great importance, and give promising practical ideas for the support of creativity in higher computer science education.

Contextualization of curriculum and course contents has been central to development of IT education at Tumaini University in rural Tanzania. However, as the development of the IT program has progressed, pedagogical challenges have become increasingly evident. The pedagogical difficulties materialize most markedly in programming courses. This paper reports an empirical study of students' and teachers' perceptions of challenges of programming education in Tanzania. The results support the anecdotal evidence from various developing countries that programming education is hindered by shallow learning strategies, unfamiliar pedagogical approaches, language problems, extrinsic motivations, free riding in group assignments, and cultural differences.

Due to an urgent national need for more IT professionals, developing countries spawn academic IT programs at an increasing rate. Those programs are often replicated from similar programs in Europe and America. Students' preferences concerning their education are, however, rarely inquired. This research study explored and analyzed Tanzanian IT students' views of challenges in their studies, as well as their views of the most important factors for their learning. A longitudinal perspective was introduced, as changes in results between 2008 and 2011 were analyzed. The findings suggest that there is a need for increased practical training, development of facilities, improvement of course design, and increased feeling of ownership and empowerment.

This paper describes our teaching experiment at the University of Helsinki, where the aim was to investigate a possibility to provide a learning environment supporting a combination of creativity, intrinsic motivation and the use of robots to bring constructionism into computer science (CS) education. To put the ideas into practice we developed a pilot course targeted at intermediate-level CS students. The learning objectives were not strict, but instead the attendees could participate in setting them and also take part in designing future uses of robots in CS1 and CS2 courses. There was no teaching in the traditional sense, but instead we arranged workshops based on creativity-enhancing working methods.