The ITiCSE '23 final keynote raised teaching soft skills, or professional dispositions, to help students face challenges in modern programming. This project addresses helping computing students develop professional dispositions through collaborative learning (CL) since some in the industry observe entry-level engineers struggling due to their fragile professional dispositions. We are motivated to understand professional expectations from entry-level engineers and present the academia-industry gap to support practitioners and researchers in advancing CL in Computing Education, encouraging positive curricula and policy changes that promote DEIA. We will present CL practices alongside their supported professional dispositions to assist practitioners in adoption. We will present the academia-industry gap in CL for future research opportunities, helping researchers advance CL practices to integrate professional dispositions the industry expects from entry-level engineers.

Many novice programmers struggle to write code from scratch and get frustrated when their code does not work. Parsons problems can reduce the difficulty of a coding problem by providing mixed-up blocks that the learner assembles in the correct order. Parsons problems can also include distractor blocks that are not needed in a correct solution, but which may help students learn to recognize and fix errors. Evidence indicates that students find Parsons problems engaging, easier than writing code from scratch, useful for learning patterns, and typically faster to solve than writing code from scratch with equivalent learning gains. This working group leverages the work of the 2022 ITiCSE working group which published an extensive literature review of Parsons problems and designed and piloted several studies based on the gaps identified by the literature review. The 2023 working group is revising, conducting, and creating new studies. We will analyze the data from these multi-institutional and multi-national studies and publish the results as well as recommendations for future working groups.

The last ten years the world has experienced a revival in computing education with countries transiting to or adopting a compulsory computing education curriculum, which has created a resurgence in undergraduate students studying computing. Coinciding with this movement, the decolonization of curriculum began to collect momentum. This paper explores these two movements in education based on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the influence on the design of computing curriculum, and instructional techniques for grades 9-16 computing modules. This review will inform computing curriculum designers and computing educators lessons learned in the application of social science learning theories in computing education curriculum design and delivery.

Programming plays a paramount role in many educational policies and initiatives. However, the current focus on coding skills poses a risk of giving pupils an over simplistic and impoverished idea of what programming means and involves. Their experiences would be much more significant if learning were aimed at understanding the richness of the nature of programs. In fact, programs are strange creatures that escape simple definitions. They are real, in that they affect our real lives; they are abstract, in that they process abstract entities; and they are concrete, in that they take up space in digital devices memory, and can be copied, transferred, corrupted. Thus, understanding the multifaceted nature of programs is crucial knowledge for all citizens of the digital era, and a fundamental component of such an understanding is getting a sense of how programs are created and work (i.e., the programming process). To the best of our knowledge, there is no Nature of Programs framework (e.g., a set of statements that describe what the nature of programs is), that teachers and policy makers can use to shape their practice and targets. The goal of the WG is developing such a framework, by collecting and organizing contributions from CER, CS experts, and educators.

Considerable effort has been put in place in recent years to build repositories of learning resources and assessment activities. Thus, raising the demand to collect and curate meaningful metadata related to their use. This is order, to improve user experience leveraging on educational data mining techniques. This work will propose firstly a set of data that can be collected and a set of similarity metrics useful for query recommendations on based on their content. Secondly, the set of results user recommendations either based on the queries they perform on the system, or on the basis of the activities they perform on the repository. Thirdly, learning resource recommendation based on other users' interests and results of similar queries, pattern of usage of resources and feedback given by similar users. An activity matrix collecting data in three dimensions: resources, users and queries is proposed; leaving implementation details and experience report for further studies.

Three previous Working Groups (WG) have met at ITiCSE conferences to explore ways of incorporating cloud computing into courses and curricula by mapping industry job skills to knowledge areas (KAs) and KAs to student learning objectives (LOs) and using these as the framework for a repository of learning materials and course exemplars \citefoster2018, foster2019, adams2020. The ongoing value of the work of these WGs will be enhanced by validating the KAs and LOs and their mapping to current job skills and continuing to build a community of educators who will contribute to and benefit from the repository.

The introduction of Computing to the national curriculum in England has led to a situation where in-service teachers need to develop subject knowledge and pedagogical expertise in computer science, which presents a significant challenge. Professional learning opportunities can support this; these may be most effective when situated in the teachers’ own working practices. This article describes a project to support Computing teachers in developing pedagogical skills by carrying out classroom-based research in their schools. A group of 22 primary (Grades K--5) and secondary (Grades 6--10) teachers from schools across England planned, designed, and implemented research projects either individually or in small groups, supported by a team of university colleagues. Inter and intra group progress was shared online and face-to-face within a distributed community of inquiry. Data collection included surveys, video data, and the projects completed by the teachers. The findings from the project are analysed using Clarke and Hollingsworth’s Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth (IMTPG), which enables an identification and exploration of teacher change. Results of the analysis demonstrate that the approach can foster “growth networks”—the construct used within IMTPG to indicate teacher change which is likely to be sustained and fundamental to teachers’ understanding. The individual nature of this change indicates that the approach supports personal change related to each teacher’s specific situation. Although there is a huge literature on action research as part of teacher professional learning, we believe this to be the first time this has been carried out in the context of computer science education. We conclude by critically reflecting on the lessons that we have learned in leading this project.

In the context of rapid curriculum change, teaching computer science in school requires new skills and knowledge that existing teachers may not have. As well as a programme of teacher professional development (TPD), certification can be used to provide recognition to in-service teachers who have made the transition to computer science. The BCS Certificate in Computer Science Teaching has been designed and developed to give teachers professional recognition of their competence in teaching the computer science elements of the Computing curriculum. In this paper we describe the innovative design of this national certification and our experience over the last two years of its implementation; we are not aware of any similar scheme to offer professional recognition to in-service K-12 computer science teachers.