The world faces escalating crises: record-breaking temperatures, widespread fires, severe flooding, increased oceanic microplastics, and unequal resource distribution. Academia introduces courses around sustainability to meet the new demand, but software engineering education lags behind. While software systems contribute to environmental issues through high energy consumption, they also hold the potential for solutions, such as more efficient and equitable resource management. Yet, sustainability remains a low priority for many businesses, including those in the digital sector. Business as usual is no longer viable. A transformational change in software engineering education is urgently needed. We must move beyond traditional curriculum models and fully integrate sustainability into every aspect of software development. By embedding sustainability as a core competency, we can equip future engineers not only to minimise harm but also to innovate solutions that drive positive, sustainable change. Only with such a shift can software engineering education meet the demands of a world in crisis and prepare students to lead the next generation of sustainable technology. This article discusses a set of challenges and proposes a customisable education roadmap for integrating sustainability into the software engineering curricula. These challenges reflect our perspective on key considerations, stemming from regular, intensive discussions in regular workshops among the authors and the community, as well as our extensive research and teaching experience in the field.

Understanding human perception is fundamental to computer graphics. However, computer science and engineering education have a track record of neglecting human concerns in favour of technical and scientific matters. The diverse and rapidly evolving nature of the field also means that educators need to be highly selective in what concepts and skills to include in syllabuses, potentially complicating the inclusion of perceptual topics in computer graphics courses. This study explores the treatment of perception as a topic in introductory computer graphics courses at Swedish universities, through analysis of course syllabuses and the attitudes of educators. Data from 22 syllabuses, three interviews and six responses from a survey were collected across twelve universities. While educators agree on the importance of understanding human perception in graphics creation, the results present a diverse set of approaches and attitudes toward teaching it. Approaches ranged from minimal inclusion to dedicated lectures, across varying perceptual topics, and perception was rarely mentioned in the course objectives. Overall, approaches seemed influenced mainly by student backgrounds, time, educator experiences, and challenges of addressing foundational skills. Based on these findings, some ways to better integrate perceptual aspects in existing curricula are proposed.

While role models are frequently mentioned in literature to broaden participation in engineering education, there are diverse ways of understanding what role modeling is, what it entails and what theory we can use to support our own reflections as professionals and students in engineering who can act as role models for others in the discipline. In this special session we invite participants to discuss their own conceptions of role modeling, in terms of what can be modeled, the intention and awareness of it, and how this may be perceived by others. To support the discussions we introduce Grande’s framework of role modeling, which builds on role modeling theory. The format of the session will be that of a World Café, where participants will alternate their participation in discussions at five different tables, each table with a theme related to the framework. With these conversations we expect participants to go back to their own contexts in academia and industry to continue the discussion with their colleagues. We also invite them to connect with facilitators and others at the session to continue research efforts in the area of role modeling in engineering education.

This Research Full Paper explores different implementations of and teachers’ experiences from challenge-driven education and similar learning approaches in engineering education and other higher education contexts. Through an action research approach key concerns among the teachers and similarities and differences between the studied courses can be identified. The study highlights the potential in these learning approaches, as means for breaking and going beyond the traditional boundaries of higher education, enhancing and cross-fertilizing engineering education with other disciplines, and empowering students both as professionals and humans. It also indicates potential barriers and in-built tensions that are crucial to handle for successful implementation. The study further shows on great opportunities for mutual learning and collaboration between teachers from diverse contexts and backgrounds. The findings are discussed in relation to research within domains such as sustainability education, transformative learning, and futures studies, and opportunities for further research and development are outlined.

Climate change is the "biggest threat modern humans have ever faced". The implications of the crisis are imminent and grave. As part of COP26, leaders from all over the world agreed to the Glasgow Climate Pact with the goal of limiting the increased rise of global temperature by 1.5 degrees. With less than 8 years left until the 2030 UN deadline in which the climate effects become irreversible, how do we prepare learners for what might be an inevitable reality? How do we equip computing students with crucial technical, ethical, and leadership skills to mitigate its effect? More importantly, how do people in positions of power, departmental and institutional, be involved? In 2019, we formed an internal working group as part of ITiCSE conference to examine how computing institutions, departments, and faculty members dealt with, if at all, the climate emergency within CS education. Our efforts included conducting a literature review, interviewing CSEd climate experts, leading a world cafe session, and collating and publishing resources from various sources for the benefit of educators interested in incorporating climate change in the curriculum. And yet, there are still struggles reported with adopting these solutions, particularly in light of the global pandemic. This panel will serve as a public forum to express institutional, departmental, and individual challenges associated with tackling the climate crisis and share successful strategies, ideas, and experiences to support the CS community. The discussions will centre over five themes previously identified in the world cafe.

This work contributes to a better understanding of computing teachers' perceptions of themselves as role models. Role models are described as important to address under-representation, yet there is little in-depth research on how role modeling works and what university teachers in computing can model to broaden participation in the discipline. We will analyze teachers' reflections on how they may, or want to, be perceived by their students, particularly in terms of professional competencies, emotions and attitudes towards well-being. We will use and further develop an already existing framework on role modeling in computing, and we will relate our findings to existing research on computing and science identities. Modeling aspects outside the computing norm can help provide students with a wider notion of what it means to be a computer scientist. Besides developing the theoretical understanding of computing teachers as role models , our work can support various ways of developing computing teachers' competences and departments' teaching culture. The results are one way to contribute to student diversity and equitable access, and more broadly increase the relevance of computing education for sustainability.

Researchers in futures studies argue that the future needs to be understood as uncertain, as not yet there. This renders mainstream educational discourses problematic, those that centre around the idea of preparing students for “the future”, defining competencies and standards. In this work, we write about critiques of contemporary education and alternative conceptions of education drawing on futures studies as well as sustainability education research. We understand learning as an emergent phenomenon and describe a conception of education that we refer to as emergentist education. We apply those theories to an open-ended group project course at an IT department at a large Swedish university. In the course, the students and the teachers develop, together with staff from an Academic Hospital in Sweden, healthcare with IT. In an action-research approach, we analyse written and oral reflections from the various actors involved in the course with the aim to understand the course, its value and challenges in new ways. Analysing the data through the lens of emergentist education theory, we discuss three themes: 1) forces on openness, 2) orientations to the future, and 3) emergent collaborative learning and novelty. We find that the educators take the role of maintaining openness, while the students demand a clear project definition. The future orientation turned out to be mostly about correcting and optimising the present. Yet, this project led to mutual learning and new paths being taken. Education can be a place for creativity and novelty, and an opportunity for learning through joint endeavours.

In this Special Session participants explore role modeling in the context of IEEE/ASEE Frontiers in Education (FIE). Role models are important in engineering education, due to their being beneficial for those who have them. While educators and other professionals may strive to be role models for others, there is little research in this area to support this goal. How do we talk about role models? How can we reflect on what we can model and how, as individuals and through giving visibility to others? Conferences like FIE are great venues to provide participants with role models. What kind of role models are FIE attendees after? In this special session participants at any career stage are introduced to Grande's theory of role modeling to address these questions. The groups will use Grande's theory to reflect on what kind of role models they would find interesting to look for in FIE. This aims to increase reflection on role modeling by the participants while also informing the organization of the event, who can consider increasing the visibility of the identified potential role models. Participants can later use a similar process to reconsider their role modeling in other areas, e.g. as teachers for their students, managers for their employees, or as conference organizers to analyze what kind of role models they are inviting to their events.

The aim of this special session is to connect researchers interested in computing and engineering education for sustainability. We will explore the use of care and care ethics as a theoretical perspective to develop sustainability education. Theoretical discussions in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) research and feminist research will be introduced to develop an understanding of care for education. Those theories will be illustrated and motivated based on concrete examples in computing and computing education. The participants get to choose among four different topics of discussion in the session, 1) the role of education to prepare for care, 2) theoretical discussions of care as a concept to develop education and education research, 3) pedagogical methods to foster care, 4) care and responsibility in the curriculum. The outcome of this session is two-fold: The participants will gain new ways of conceiving education for human and planetary well-being and they will get to know researchers and educational developers with an interest in and experiences with sustainability education.

The learning agreement has great potential as a learning intervention that supports learners to take ownership of their learning and to develop in ways that are meaningful to them. It is useful to educate a diverse student cohort. In a project course as the one investigated in this study, the learning agreement intervention can be beneficial to make use of the different experiences and competencies that a diverse student group brings to the table. In practice however, the learning agreement invention is uncommon in education and not well understood. As it is used in the present study, it is essentially a document in which the students describe competencies that they want to develop, as well as how they will develop and assess those competencies. This study has investigated the learning agreement intervention as it was conducted in an open-ended group project, in particular a workshop to improve the quality and usefulness of the students' learning agreements. Two versions of learning agreements, the one before the workshop and the one after, from 19 students were analysed, as well as semi-structured interview data with the students. We find that many learning agreements are of little use, even after the workshop. A qualitative thematic analysis suggests that the students experience the learning agreement and workshop as useful but that they still struggle with the learning agreement, particularly with describing activities to develop and assess their learning. We derive ideas for how to improve the learning agreement intervention, e.g. by integrating it more with the project work.

Climate change is the defining environmental challenge now facing our planet. Babies born today will be 22 when global warming reaches 1.5 C, according to the latest IPCC report and forecasts. What will life be like in 2040? How do we as educators respond today, to the challenges that lie ahead for the next generation?

This article concludes a longitudinal study with the broader aim to explore learner development as a long-term, social process. One goal has been to inform the endeavours of improving student engagement, retention, as well as under-representation of certain demographics in computing. Students of two computer science--related study programmes (CS/IT) reflected on their engagement in their field of study at different times during the first three study years. Drawing on social identity theory, the focus has been to analyse and describe different ways in which the students experience participation in CS/IT, i.e., doing, thinking, and feeling, in relation to CS/IT, negotiated among different people. Insights into participation in CS/IT were used to discuss what it entails to fit in and become a computing professional. Phenomenographic analysis yields an outcome space that describes increasingly broad ways in which first-, second-, and third-year students experience participation in CS/IT. Two further outcome spaces provide nuanced insights into experiences that are of increasing relevance as the students advance in their studies, participation as problem solving, and problem solving for others. Participation as problem solving appears to be central in this learning environment and the students integrate such experiences into their histories of engagement in CS/IT. In study year 3, the students also reason about participation as problem solving for others that they encounter in the human computer interaction course. However, at that time several students perform a technical problem solver identity and reject such broader ways of participating in CS/IT.

This full paper in the research track presents how individuals in computing education may have role models that represent different ways of engaging in the discipline and/or profession as a student or a professional. The study is based on two rounds of interview-based data collection at a department of computing: a longitudinal study of undergraduate students' view of the discipline, and an examination of their teachers' experiences as role models in computing education. Our results challenge traditional views of role models as those who set the norms, presenting instead role models as potentially capable of change, at different scales (including none), depending on their level of power. These role models are students, academics, and other professionals. We show that the potential of role models must be understood with respect to how engagement in computing is constructed in social interaction. Actions are suggested for relevant stakeholders to reflect on which role models are receiving more or less exposure than they should and how through these role models participation in computing can be broadened in terms of not only diverse backgrounds but also ways of engaging in computing.

This working group contributes to formulating a framework for modeling competencies in the current and future disciplines that comprise computing education. We draw upon the innovative approach taken in the curricular document for information technology (IT2017), curricular competency frameworks, other related documents such as the software engineering competency model (SWECOM), the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), current research in competency models, and elicitation workshop results from other computing conferences. The outcomes contribute to the Computing Curricula 2020 (CC2020) project, and include the formulation and review of sets of disciplinary-relevant competencies for use in computing education. This work directly informs the CC2020 project sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society.

One of the challenges in being a teacher is to set up an educational setting where the students receive relevant learning opportunities for the specific course, the students' education in general, and for their future. However, efforts to create such educational settings do not always work in the way that faculty has intended. In this paper we investigate one such effort seen from a critical incident perspective. Central to the analysis in this paper is how the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) can provide explanations for the incident. The critical incident can be summarised as students refusing to take part in a non-compulsory, but from the faculty perspective highly educational, activity. We describe the incident in depth, give the background for the educational intervention, and analyse the incident from the perspective of TPB. This paper makes two major contributions to engineering education research. The first is the development of a method for analysing critical teaching and learning incidents using the TPB. The critical incident analysis illustrates how the method is used to analyse and reason about the students' behaviour. Another contribution is the development of a range of insights which deal with challenges raised by learning interventions, especially those involved with acquiring hidden or “invisible skills” not usually seen or acknowledged by students to belong to core subject area of a degree program.

With a goal of preparing software engineering students for practice in today's global settings, Uppsala University has for some years run courses involving global collaboration. The "IT in Society" course is one such course which applies an 'Open Ended Group Project' model, in partnership with a local health sector client and global educational partners. Within each iteration of the course, students across the partnering institutions are given a brief around an open-ended problem. They work in collaboration with their client and stakeholders to investigate options and produce a report with their findings and recommendations, informed by global perspectives. The report may or may not be supported by working software prototypes. We analyze student evaluations & reflections on the course to unpack their perceptions of software engineering, the perceived relevance of a global learning experience and its role in reshaping their identities as global software engineers.

Critical thinking is one of the key competencies listed by OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) [1], a central European Community organization, and is also mentioned as a learning outcome for higher education by international organizations, such as ABET, ACM, and IEEE, as well as in numerous national and university legislations regarding higher education degrees. The ability to communicate, not least in writing, is another important competence our students are supposed to gain during their education. There is thus high agreement regarding the importance of these competencies, but it is not clear how to achieve this.

How do computer science and engineering IT students become computer scientists or IT engineers and how do they perceive their engagement in the discipline as meaningful? What is the role of education in this respect, and how does education support or hinder students' identity development?

Low enrollment and high drop-out rates in computer science (CS) have led to an alarming decrease in number of graduates in western countries. What are students' learning experiences, how do these affect their attitudes towards learning CS? This question was explored by investigating diverse students, of a broad study program with courses in humanities and technology, at the end of an introductory course in CS (CS1), which has been designed to enhance students' engagement. The results of a first questionnaire were remarkably positive: All students reflected their experiences as overall positive. Almost half of the students stated, that they had been skeptical towards learning CS before the course. All of these students described positive transformations of attitudes. These results provided an interesting starting point for further research using interviews: What exactly have these students experienced and how do they reason about future engagement? We point out students' experiences that were crucial for a positive transformation of attitudes as well as critical aspects in students' reasoning on future engagement in CS.