Sustainability and ethics are topics of significant, current importance in higher education. In engineering education, they take on even greater importance as engineers play a key role in addressing global issues. While multiple institutions have implemented initiatives explicitly focusing on sustainability and ethics in their curricula, less is known about the degree to which students perceive these efforts and their impact on their learning. The contributions of this study are important because they address discrepancies between instructors' intentions and the curriculum as experienced by students in the context of curricular reforms and an institutional shift towards sustainability. Our investigation of the perceptions of 244 students from 5 different engineering programs at a European engineering school shows that, contrary to institutional efforts, students do not yet see sustainability and ethics being a part of their courses. They identify lacunae in information and training, feedback from instructors, and inclusion in assessments. Although the data does not indicate differences based on year of study, it does reveal differences between study programmes. Open text responses (147) indicate that students welcome greater integration of sustainability and ethics in their engineering programmes, although what this would look like is not clear for some students. Since what students learn has been shown to depend both on what they perceive they are learning, and on the priorities communicated by assessment criteria, effective integration of sustainability and ethics in engineering curricula will require institutions and instructors to be more coherent and visible about the central importance of these topics and skills.

Despite the importance of using artifacts during the design thinking process, there is a limited understanding of the influence of tangibles with lower perceptual richness on design thinking skills within educational settings. It is speculated that tangibles may ease the visualization and communication of ideas, enhance interactions and collaboration, as well as create a playful experience for participants. With imposing external constraints, tangibles can help students prioritize and focus on essential elements in communication and developing narratives around their proposals, and create a relatively simple platform for thinking and reasoning through different perspectives, replicating what designers do in real-world practice. We initiated a study to explore the use of tangibles in a graduate-level management course at a technical university in Switzerland. Three different tangible activities, using LEGO bricks, were incorporated during earlier phases of the design thinking process, and student groups were encouraged to take advantage of the tangibles. Employing a qualitative case study approach, this study explored the influence of using tangibles concerning design thinking characteristics. While most students demonstrated engagement, collaboration, and playfulness during the activities, the results showed that the explicit benefits of tangibles depend on the type of activity and group dynamics. The primary benefit reported was when students worked on developing problem statements where they co-created meaning by manipulating LEGO pieces. The use of tangibles not only helped students with visualization and communicating ideas; it added flexibility for exploration as ideas emerged through conversational and material practices. Specifically, the findings demonstrated the benefits of tangibles concerning two traits of design thinking: experimentalism and collaboration. In this paper, we elaborate on the underemphasized role of tangibles concerning transversal skills and point out critical criteria for developing and incorporating tangible activities within higher education settings. Reflecting on the results, we argue that using tangibles can facilitate developing collective understanding.

Context. With the introduction of Computer Science (CS) into curricula worldwide, teachers’ adoption of CS pedagogical content is essential to ensure the long-term success of reform initiatives. Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programs play a key role in this process. Unfortunately, adoption is seldom evaluated in CS-CPDs or CPDs in general. The result is a dearth of studies (i) modelling teachers’ adoption of CS pedagogical content or (ii) investigating factors influencing the uptake of this new discipline. Both aspects are crucial to design and characterize successful CPD programs. Objectives . We thus propose the Teachers’ Adoption of CS (TACS) model to investigate factors influencing the adoption of CS pedagogical content by teachers who are following a mandatory CS-CPD program. More specifically, the model proposes that contextual factors (e.g., age, gender, and general teaching experience), prior factors (e.g., experience, and CS perception), and acceptance factors (e.g., interest, and self-efficacy) may impact teachers’ adoption of CS pedagogical content. Methods. The study included 180 grades 5 and 6 teachers (students aged 9–11) that were following a mandatory CS-CPD program. The CS-CPD program involved participation in three-day-long sessions distributed over the 2019–2020 academic year. In between sessions, with the support of instructional coaches in the schools, teachers were encouraged, but not required, to adopt the CS pedagogical content. Therefore, during the CPD, and employing surveys based on the TACS model, we evaluated teachers’ adoption of the proposed content and investigated how the different factors influenced it. Results. At the PD-level, the results indicate that self-efficacy and interest queried during the CS-CPD are indicative of CS pedagogical content adoption. To shed more light on the relationship between these metrics, a more in-depth analysis was conducted with n = 92 teachers whose responses could be matched between sessions. While interest relates to how teachers adopt CS pedagogical content overall, both interest and self-efficacy are necessary to ensure the likelihood of a specific activity being adopted. Finally, individual teacher characteristics appear to impact adoption, with teachers with low experience with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) requiring onboarding, while middle-aged teachers require convincing to adopt CS pedagogical content. Conclusion. Three takeaways emerge from the study. First, the analyses confirm the foundation of the TACS model. Second, the findings establish the key role that interest plays in said model. Finally, the results support the relationship between the contextual, prior and acceptance factors on the adoption of primary school CS pedagogical content.

Context Introducing Computer Science (CS) into formal education can be challenging, notably when considering the numerous stakeholders involved which include the students, teachers, schools, and policy makers. We believe these perspectives should be considered conjointly, which is possible within Research Practice Partnerships (RPPs) . RPPs look to bridge research-practice gaps and have seen an increase in the field of education and CS-education. Unfortunately, RPPs are considered to be under-researched, in addition to presenting their own challenges. Objectives To the purpose of assessing how RPPs may support the successful introduction of CS into formal education, we investigate three perspectives (students, teachers, and RPP stakeholders) and their interplay within the context of a multi-institution RPP conducting a pilot program to introduce CS to secondary school students. Methods A mixed methods analysis was employed to triangulate data in a concurrent triangulation design. The data included (i) three surveys distributed over the semester to 106 grade 9 students (ages 12-14), (ii) four teacher-journals, (iii) two interviews and four focus groups with the teachers and representatives of the partner institutions. Findings From the students’ perspective , while their self-efficacy increased, their motivation decreased throughout the semester due to a miss-match between their expectations and the course. The findings also indicate that gender biases and heterogeneity are already present in grade 9. From the teachers’ perspective , co-constructing the study plan, having access to regular support and collaborating within a community of practice when starting to teach CS all facilitated the teachers’ experience. Finally, from the RPP’s perspective the collaboration between stakeholders and having researchers evaluate the program were considered to be key elements in the pilot program. However, there appears to be a research-practice gap, in large part due to limited interactions between researchers and curriculum designers, and researchers and the teachers in the field. Conclusions From the students’ perspective it appears relevant to introduce CS (i) prior to secondary school to address motivation and bias-related issues early on, and (ii) to all students to avoid participation being motivation-, stereotype-, or belief-driven, and risk broadening the gap between students, (iii) all the while being attentive to course format and content to ensure that the course meets students’ expectations and fosters autonomous motivation. From the teachers’ perspective , while the support provided met the teachers’ needs, it is essential to find means of scaling such approaches when looking to deploy CS-curricular reforms to entire administrative regions. Finally, from the RPP’s perspective (i) teachers’ should be given a voice in the RPP to better align with the field, and (ii) researchers’ roles should be reconsidered to move beyond being only evaluators, and towards having a more co-constructive role in setting up the curricular reform. Recommendations are provided for researchers and practitioners involved in CS curricular reforms.

Abstract Research has shown that Educational Robotics (ER) enhances student performance, interest, engagement and collaboration. However, until now, the adoption of robotics in formal education has remained relatively scarce. Among other causes, this is due to the difficulty of determining the alignment of educational robotic learning activities with the learning outcomes envisioned by the curriculum, as well as their integration with traditional, non-robotics learning activities that are well established in teachers’ practices. This work investigates the integration of ER into formal mathematics education, through a quasi-experimental study employing the Thymio robot and Scratch programming to teach geometry to two classes of 15-year-old students, for a total of 26 participants. Three research questions were addressed: (1) Should an ER-based theoretical lecture precede, succeed or replace a traditional theoretical lecture? (2) What is the students’ perception of and engagement in the ER-based lecture and exercises? (3) Do the findings differ according to students’ prior appreciation of mathematics? The results suggest that ER activities are as valid as traditional ones in helping students grasp the relevant theoretical concepts. Robotics activities seem particularly beneficial during exercise sessions: students freely chose to do exercises that included the robot, rated them as significantly more interesting and useful than their traditional counterparts, and expressed their interest in introducing ER in other mathematics lectures. Finally, results were generally consistent between the students that like and did not like mathematics, suggesting the use of robotics as a means to broaden the number of students engaged in the discipline.

In the educational framework, knowledge assessment is a critical component, and quizzes (sets of questions with concise answers) are a popular tool for this purpose. This paper focuses on the generation of balanced quizzes, i.e., quizzes that relate to a given set of documents, and to the central concepts described by the documents, in an evenly distributed manner. Our approach leverages a graph representing the relationships between questions, documents, and concepts, and phrases quiz construction as a node selection problem in this graph. We provide algorithms for constructing the graph and for selecting a good set of quiz questions. In our concrete implementation, we build quizzes for a collection of Wikipedia articles and evaluate them both with simulated students and with real human quiz takers, finding that our balanced quizzes are better suited at determining which articles the user has not read (corresponding to their knowledge gaps) than reasonable baselines.