The development of non-technical skills, such as critical thinking and public speaking, is increasingly recognized in computing curricula as essential for computing professionals in the job market. Universities are adopting active learning methods to cultivate these skills, among which are debate-based teaching methods. Previous literature showed that debating is used in many knowledge domains, and can help develop skills of information synthesis, critical thinking, and effective verbal communication. In spite of these benefits, however, debating in computing education is still rare. This work explores a partial redesign of a debates-based teaching method, called Tech Battles, implemented in a 6-ECTS non-technical course at the University of Trento targeted to first-year Master's students in Computer Science with a minor in innovation and entrepreneurship. Battles have been part of the course since 2013, and over the years the teaching team upgraded the methodology, which now foresees a preparatory activity where students read a science fiction short story assigned by the teachers. In this paper, we discuss how this latest modification changes the course and its impacts: how the workflow of each debate evolved, our criteria for selecting short stories, preliminary observations gathered from the field, and the research methods that will be used to more thoroughly validate the updated method.

This innovative practice full paper aims to describe how an interdisciplinary group of engineering students developed sustainability competencies during a two-week Challenge-Based Learning summer school on analysing the impacts and sustainability of digital education and its infrastructure. Our contribution aims to create a “fair” narrative of this experience, taking into account multiple perspectives, and building a transparent and representative reconstruction of the students' competence development. Our work is qualitative in nature: we gathered pedagogical insights, participants' emotions, thoughts, and experiences, by relying on a variety of data sources (of which the primary was student diaries), ultimately creating a micro-ethnography of the course. This approach allowed us to identify and track the evolution of the GreenComp competencies over time, create team profiles, and gain insights on the evolution of the students' thoughts, perspectives, and social dynamics. While further research is needed to refine the approach, reduce researcher burden, and test it in other environments, this paper aims to start the process of creating an analysis method that lets teachers and researchers reconstruct the students' learnings, experiences, and personal reflections in a rich and transparent way, going beyond the creation of all-too-reductive performance metrics, and contributing to the ongoing discussion on the development of non-technical competencies in engineering education.

This research-to-practice full paper describes the results we got from enabling students to fine-tune their own learning experience in a Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) course. Engineering educators have been working for several years on how best to integrate CBL into computing courses, recognizing CBL's role in fostering crucial skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving. At FIE 2023, we proposed a possible scaffold named “Choose Your Own Adventure in Challenge-Based Learning” (CYOA-CBL) that aimed to make CBL more adaptable and empower the students to personalise their experience, positioning themselves in a spectrum ranging from a more open and creative approach to a more structured and guided CBL experience. During the past academic year, we implemented CYOA-CBL in a mandatory four-month course at a medium-sized European university. With this work, we present the results we got from a qualitative study where we used mixed methods of data collection to evaluate CYOA-CBL and verify whether students understood the course process. In this paper, we discuss how students tended to adopt both open and structured approach and they appreciated the flexible nature of the course, leveraging the opportunity to change their path during the process to adapt it to their challenges. Students also valued the recurring structure of CYOA-CBL mentoring and tutorials and they had a general good understanding of the “next steps” to perform. At the same time, they highlighted the need to improve the tutorials, even if in a controversial way.

In the last decades, teaching methods in computing are shifting towards active learning. Among these, a notable case are debate-based classes which can be used to develop skills such as critical thinking which, are in high demand in the workplace. The choice of debate topic is a particularly controversial theme, since it can influence the students' motivation, experience, and understanding of the course's content. In this poster, we propose an evolution of a debate-based teaching methodology, called Tech Battles, to include the reading of science fiction short stories as a preparatory activity. The intervention takes place in an Innovation and Entrepreneurship course for computing students at the University of Trento, where science fiction can help students develop critical thinking about technology and innovation, but also aid them in understanding the debate's context, and ultimately enhance their learning. We conclude our reflections by exploring possible implications of this change, connecting it to existing traditions that leverage science fiction as a pedagogical tool.

Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) is being increasingly adopted in engineering education, including in mandatory courses. Recently, authors have described a tension between structured and open approaches to CBL, with significant pedagogical tradeoffs in both cases. This Work-In-Progress Innovative Practice article proposes “Choose Your Own Adventure in Challenge-Based Learning” (CYOA-CBL), a model which reconfigures the open/structured CBL duality as a spectrum, and empowers students to fine-tune their learning by making their course more structured or open. Through CYOA-CBL, we hope to give our contribution to making CBL more replicable and better aligned with diverse student motivations.