This research-to-practice full paper proposes a structured approach to cooperatively develop, review, and employ open educational resources (OER) for pre-service teachers focusing on computer ethics and digital competences. The rapidly progressing digital and social transformation requires students as well as teachers and staff to adapt their teaching and learning. While this holds true for the vast majority of educational contexts, (pre-service) teachers are particularly challenged into acquiring digital skills and almost at the same time passing on the respective knowledge and digital skills to their students. Understandably, pre-service teachers long for reliable, easily accessible resources that they could use in class to effectively support them in preparing their students for their future jobs and lives. The current paper presents the authors' student-centered approach to developing OER on computer ethics with emphasis on including students in all phases of the development and testing of the OER, sparking students to measurably advance their digital competences. To provide accessible, high-quality resources, the focus will be on presenting the student-centered quality assurance approach we introduced while testing the OER in class and improving them based on secondary-level students' feedback. Methodologically, this paper employs the cyclic participatory research approach, which involves analyzing students' reflections and feedback, the researcher's personal observations throughout the process, the feedback of secondarylevel students during the pilot testing in the classroom, as well as the perceptions of the master students implementing the OER in a lesson in class. As a result, this study presents a set of OER developed in a student-centered manner, specifically designed to meet the needs of pre-service and early career teachers. Furthermore, the paper suggests and reflects a genuinely student-centered process of developing, evaluating, and improving OER. It aims to inspire educators, staff, educational researchers, course designers, administrators, (pre-service) teachers and interested tertiary-level students to constructively and collaboratively engage in a learner-centered development of OER and thereby support our society's learning and democratic living with the digital transformation.

This research full paper strives to shed light on educators' ways of dealing with the rapid advances in generative AI tools, which have opened up new challenges and opportunities for learners and educators alike. Both are confronted with the opportunity of supporting themselves in the completion of a wide range of tasks in this new reality. The study presented here aims to identify different strategies teachers use to develop their competences in responding to students' AI usage and in utilizing this new technology for their own professional tasks. Strategies are identified through a series of semi-structured qualitative interviews with a diverse group of nineteen teachers from two vocational and three general education secondary schools in urban and rural areas of Austria. The participants are mainly teaching technical and language subjects and range from technical experts teaching IT to general education teachers who are faced with the need to quickly adapt to learners with different levels of digital and AI competences. The findings of a qualitative content analysis of the gathered data are contextualized with previous work on educators' digital competence development and comparisons are drawn. It was found that a major contribution to the educators' skills in handling generative AI technology was made through self-regulated learning facilitated by various resources ranging from academic literature to social media and experimentation, as was the case with general digital skills. Nevertheless, the desire to be formally supported in further developing AI competence through training was voiced with requirements for this training being that the content is up-to-date, contains practical examples, and is delivered by experts. In addition, open, inclusive forms of seminars were suggested. These findings aim to inform curriculum designers, teacher educators, professional development trainers and administrators. Furthermore, struggling educators will find a starting point for self-organized work on their AI competences and pointers to potentially useful resources both for their teaching and their own learning in the field.

This research-to-practice full paper explores the effectiveness of coaching interventions with the goal of enhancing teamwork and project management skills among students in higher education. The paper reviews related studies on coaching practices aimed at developing students' professional skills as part of their higher education. It proceeds by investigating computer science students' perspectives on selected team coaching interventions. These build upon agile practices are targeted at facilitating and accelerating students becoming professional and productive - a ubiquitous need in the industry. To assess the efficacy of introducing team coaching in a project management course of the faculty of computer science at a large mid-European university, the researchers employed a method triangulation consisting of a pre-survey, focus groups, and retrospectives. The pre-survey assessed students' prior experience with teamwork, perception of project success factors, and interest in coaching interventions. Besides conducting a one-hour coaching workshop for all course participants, two out of eight student-teams expressed particular interest in participating in regular coaching sessions conducted remotely and in-person throughout the semester. The coaching sessions introduced students to various frameworks and approaches, including the Tuckman stages of team development, and focused on improving communication, organization, and task distribution within teams. Regular retrospectives allowed teams to reflect on their progress, identify areas for improvement, and implement action items for the next milestone. At the end of the semester, in-person retrospectives and focus groups illuminated students' experiences and preferences regarding coaching and teamwork. Results of the study indicate that optional team coaching interventions have the potential to improve students' team projects, application of agile practices, teamwork, and organizational competencies, given that students are open and willing to invest their time. Thus, this paper seeks to build a basis from which to spark curriculum designers, educators, educational researchers, and administrators to consider ways to include targeted team coaching interventions into undergraduate computing curricula.

The goal of this research full paper is to provide insight into most recent findings of interviews with faculty members teaching digital skills in an integrated and innovative way embedded into courses on subject didactics of a teacher education program. Pre-studies analyzing students' perspectives regarding the inclusion of digital competences in the teacher education program of a large Central-European university revealed that less than half of the students who were at an advanced stage in their studies felt sufficiently prepared to impart digital competences in their daily teaching. Given the importance of being digitally competent in the modern, digital era, the question arises, how digital competences can be sustainably included in the curriculum of a teacher education program. This paper analyzes interviews with five faculty members successfully teaching digital skills in concert with subject didactics of Geography in order to identify best practices for the integration of digital competences. The first author asked our Interview Partners to provide insight into the content they mediated, the integration of digital competences and tools in their courses, how their teaching could be further improved, and what challenges they encounter. Eventually, we looked for best practices and collected instructors' thoughts on improvements on a curricular level and examples of transferring the good practices to other subjects, such that future students could benefit from a better integration of digital competences. For this paper, we analyzed the data with a mixture of narrative analysis and thematic analysis. Improving the mediating of digital skills and competences in a wider range of subjects at the university level should eventually help students, and ultimately their students, to implement digital know-how such as modern teaching tools into their courses, making teaching more effective and computational thinking as well as related fields of computing more accessible to academic as well as secondary and younger students. The research so far has shown promising results considering examples of tools that can be used on a broad spectrum of subjects and lead to a factor of learned new digital competences if used properly. On the other hand, lecturers also warned about relying too much on technology in specific tasks such as orientation on a map or analyzing statistical data. We conclude that combining existing approaches with new, more modern didactics can be the key to transferring the competencies required for our students' future.

The goal of this research-to-practice full paper is to present current findings of the evaluation of a learner-centered course on IT project management aiming to foster digital skills along with professional competencies and share derived good practices. The 21st century and the ongoing digitization pose new challenges to the workforce and, in particular, young professionals in the IT sector. Digital skills, personal skills, and interpersonal skills have never been more relevant, which especially applies to project teams of the IT sector. This paper uses a qualitative content analysis of students' teamwork reflection forms to identify success factors and barriers of teamwork in the 21st century from the perspective of 42 students of a learner-centered course on IT project management as part of the computer science bachelor degree program of a large mid-European university. Within this context, the present study carried out in the summer term 2022 utilized four research instruments: a pre-course questionnaire, a teamwork reflection form, a standardized course evaluation survey, and an analysis of the teams' performance. The results show that students predominantly relied on online collaboration during self-regulated working phases, whereby “interpersonal skills” and “communication” were the most frequently mentioned success factors. The standardized course feedback revealed that students were satisfied with the course, scoring a mean rating of 1.5 on a scale from 1 (very good) to 5 (very bad). Positive feedback revolved around the attitude of the lecturer, the provided freedom, and teamwork. Based on the course experience, the paper proposes six recommendations for modern student-centered project management courses. We conclude that developing interpersonal skills should go hand in hand with a high quality of interacting with digital tools and be emphasized in managing students' IT-projects for which the described course is intended to serve as a source of inspiration for instructors, study directors, and curriculum designers.

The aim of our paper is to provide good practices for teaching data science to non-computer science students and find out how we can motivate female students to take MINT (Mathematics, Computer science, Natural science and Technology) classes. The analyzed data science course is offered at University of Vienna in the Business Analytics, Data Science, and Digital Humanities faculties as part of the masters' programs. In this work, we outline the course structure and present findings gained through teaching it. Moreover, we highlight the main differences between the editions of the course. Anonymous surveys, grade analysis, and student interviews, show that female students achieved the same learning outcomes as their male peers in all the terms as measured by the total score and all three sub-scores, namely the project submission, the mid-term quiz, and the final quiz. In 2020 and 2021, no significant differences could be found in student performance by their attended study program. In 2022, a difference could be found in the midterm exam; however, no significant difference could be found in the final exam and the project work, indicating that the course was able to harmonize the learners' diverse background. This suggests that the diverse learning opportunities offered in this course fit the individual needs of students of different backgrounds, which increases the accessibility of the data science field among non-computer science students. We propose the course as described in this paper as a good practice of teaching 21st century digital skills in a studentcentered way and conclude the paper with five recommendations.

This research full paper is concerned with the question, in how far advanced pre-service teachers at the University of Vienna feel ‘fit’ to mediate digital skills as part of their instruction at secondary levels K5–K8. While the digital transformation is progressing rapidly, digital skills have become indispensable for all stakeholders in the educational field. To address this issue, we composed an online questionnaire consisting of closed- and open-ended questions. It was distributed among 4,054 students of the teacher education degree program and generated 322 full responses. In the survey, the students were asked to state their opinion on the integration of digital competencies in their attended teacher education degree program and how to improve it. With the use of qualitative content analysis (QCA), we analyzed which competencies and tools they missed the most in their studies or had to acquire on their own.The results of this mixed methods study indicate a lack of essential digital skills in the studies of most students, and that they feel a lack of preparation for the challenges to come as a teacher in the modern world. Moreover, most students agree that they had to acquire more than 75% of the required digital competencies on their own and pointed out the skills and tools they required the most throughout their study program or during their work as a teacher. Yet, some students report good practices in use in elective courses and in courses of various subject didactics. The paper provides a short overview of which digital competencies students wish most to be covered in their studies, including a truly professional handling of MS Teams and other tools such as learning apps, response systems, and tools for issuing learning materials and quizzes. As much as we value students’ capacities for self-learning in the digital sphere, we conclude with implications for a thoughtful integration of digital skills in teacher education programs to optimally prepare students for tomorrow’s challenges.

The aim of this research-to-practice full paper is to present the results of most recent analyses of the long-term school pilot project named "learning office approach". The learning office represents an alternative branch of a technology-oriented vocational secondary school in Europe encompassing the grades K9–K13 and has been implemented at the IT department in 2016. Students of a learning office cohort have flexible course schedules allowing them to choose between several subjects on a daily basis, which in turn enables differentiation and individualization: Students seeking help or striving to deepen their knowledge and skills may visit chosen subjects more often. Since learning office subjects do not rely on lectures and direct instruction, teachers become facilitative coaches helping students become self-responsible learners and study in a self-driven, self-directed way, which in turn fosters their 21stcentury skills.The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting emergency remote teaching strategies demonstrated the supreme importance of digital competences and self-efficacy: Students were abruptly required to work autonomously with digital systems and study at home in a self-driven way. Since the learning office heavily relies on students working with digital educational material and tools in a self-directed and student-centered way, the question arises if learners show indications of increased ICT competences and self-efficacy in the learning office.This paper evaluates the interplay of students’ self-reported ICT skills, school-specific self-efficacy, and academic performance in the learning office approach and traditional classrooms. Based on an extensive literature review, a questionnaire was developed and distributed among all 552 students of the grades 9–13 and students’ final grades of the winter term 2021/22 were analyzed. The results show a significant increase in self-perceived problem coping skills and ICT competences in the learning office approach, including the sub-scales "general ICT self-concept", "communication", "process and store", and "generate content". We conclude that technology-enhanced student-centered approaches, such as the learning office, are a viable method to foster students’ 21stcentury digital skills.

This Research to Practice Full Paper summarizes insights from three cycles of participatory action research on learning to program by developing simple video games in secondary-level classrooms using pair-programming. We found that pair-programming is an effective learning method for programming that additionally helps students acquire various other 21st-century skills in computer science classes at K9 level. As a follow-up to participatory action research, a series of seven interviews with computer science teachers and researchers from North America, Africa, and Europe, who focusg on pair programming, was conducted. The interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis by Mayring. Finally, the findings were interpreted and related to collaborative and experiential learning theories. Our mixed-methods study aims at presenting teachers’ attitudes toward the pair-programming setting. Furthermore, it examines if that setting is promotive to problem-solving skills, has an improved learning outcome, fosters a higher motivation, increases satisfaction, social skills, and positive attitudes toward coding.Based on the mixed-methods research, practical implications for learning to program in secondary-level classrooms are derived. With this contribution, we want to enlarge teachers’ and researchers’ repertoire to make programming-learning more engaging, more motivative, and more successful. This research should be the foundation for developing a positive image of programming for young learners of any gender and culture.

This Full Paper in the Research-To-Practice Category illustrates what an online survey of students’ opinions reveals about students’ perceived learning and take-away from a course on Data Science. The course is offered at University of Vienna in the Business Analytics, Data Science, and Digital Humanities faculties as part of the masters’ programs. In this work, we outline the course structures, goals, modules, and present preliminary findings gained while teaching the course. Due to the global pandemic and resulting lock-downs, the course was held online, hence, we also analyze the effects of the current situation on the students.The results revealed that the structure of the course is appreciated by the students. Furthermore, the students liked the open source software taught in the course where they can create visual workflows with an intuitive, drag-and-drop style graphical interface, without the need for coding. The results also confirmed our hypothesis which showed that working in groups is more complex and difficult using online tools. We learn that the instructor-generated technique for forming the groups assigning to each group students with different backgrounds, lead to teams that are able to solve problems faster as they are more cognitively diverse. These findings confirm that the approach used in the Data Science course is viable for teaching computer science skills to non computer-scientist and can be used by other educational institutions.

Despite continuous efforts to promote ICT related career paths, statistics still show a clear underrepresentation of women in both ICT professions and education. The Dig-Equality FF project develops a set of educational materials for young adolescents to address this issues early on. The following paper presents a part of this tool box: a gamified survey and reflection tool aiming to identify and tackle potential obstacles on the way to a gender balance in the field of ICT. This playful educational tool gathers data to analyse prevalent gender stereotypes regarding job sectors among young adolescents but also to spark discussion and reflect on related aspects. Thus, we aim to alleviate potential misconceptions and point out new perspectives.

The under-representation of women in IT has multiple possible causes, ranging from sociocultural aspects to individual dispositions and social attribution. This full research to practice paper explores secondary school students' (age 12–15) stereotypical perspectives of computer scientists and possible ways to challenge them. The major goal is to let young students form a more accurate concept of a computer science professionals by alleviating distorted images, often transmitted through media and the environment. Students who might not think of themselves as fitting in the prevalent stereotype of a computer scientist and may even lose interest in the field. Consequently, our approach challenges stereotypes in order to make any effort to raise young students' interest in computer science and in pursuing careers in this field. As part of this endeavor, we analyzed the drawings and descriptions of IT professionals made by 87 students aged 12–15 to determine what sets of preconceived perspectives and misconceptions are present in the learners' minds regarding persons in the IT profession. Our results have shown that that stereotypical views on IT actually exist in students' mindsets, but are subject to change when systematically challenged in a friendly and safe atmosphere. Aside of the scientific contribution, the paper aims to inspire and support educators in their efforts to help women and underrepresented groups in computing outgrow inaccurate stereotypes and to uncover young students' potential interest in the field. With this we aim to contribute to overcoming the gender imbalance and foster more equality in the occupational field of information technologies. Strategically, by creating a more sensitive, diverse and harmonious future that computer scientists knowingly and unknowingly co-shape.

This Research to Practice Full Paper depicts and evaluates a secondary school project on using pair- and solo-programming of mini-games in introductory programming classes. In addition to investigating various factors influencing students' problem-solving skills (K9; age 14-15), we introduce the software metric Lines Of Code (LOC) to compare outcomes on that specific measure in the pair- and solo-programming setting. The mini-games were developed with the free personal edition of the game development engine Unity™ and C#. In the current study, four different classes at the secondary level were instructed and researched. All classes had approximately the same number of students, the same tasks, the same tutorials, but were using a different social setting for programming. In response to the worldwide pandemic in the years 2020 and 2021, instruction and research proceeded either in virtual or in hybrid-learning mode. We chose participatory action research to accommodate for the complexity of factors inherent in the field as well as for its iterative, cyclic nature. The current cycle is the third of a series on studies that have investigated various aspects of introductory pair-programming. The evaluation phase employs a digital questionnaire with open and closed questions aimed to capture student's perceptions regarding problem solving. In addition, the software metric Lines Of Code” (LOC), traditionally used to measure the size of a computer program by counting the number of lines of the program's source code, was adapted to measure students' achievement in pair- and solo-programming. With our research we aim to contribute to make learning to program more effective, engaging, and inclusive, and we would like to promote 21stcentury competences besides programming skills. In addition, we are eager to share our practice of pair-programming with educators in order to inspire them to experiment with pair-programming as a social setting with high potential, even in times of required social distancing.

This full research to practice paper investigates the setting of pair-programming focusing on its effects on students' learning to program when using a visual versus text-based programming language. In particular, we are interested whether there are any differences in learning outcomes and social/motivational factors to keep in mind when learners' make their initial steps in programming in a visual versus text-based language while employing a pair-programming approach. First a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted, encompassing searches in the ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore/Electronic Library, LNCS (Springer), and Google Scholar. The results of the SLR informed the second step, namely the design of a qualitative study consisting of the evaluation of students' achievements, a questionnaire, and focus interviews with students at secondary level (K10). Students worked in pair-programming (PP) and solo-programming (SP) mode while using a visual language (MIT App Inventor) and a text-based language (Python), respectively. In a nutshell, we found that regarding achievement, students tended to earn more points in the PP setting. This tendency was more distinct in the text-based condition compared to visual programming. In both conditions, students responded that in the PP setting they had more fun solving the assignments and the PP setting had helped to solve problems faster. Aside of the scientific findings, the paper describes the didactic concepts used in order to inspire educators to engage in similar practice and research. With this contribution we aim to enrich educators' and researchers' repertoire of making introductory programming lessons more engaging and successful.

This Full Paper in the research to practice category explores pupils' motivation to learn programming by game development in the game development environment (GDE) UnityTM. After getting to know block-based programming through controlling robots, 66 students with minimal computer literacy between 14 and 16 years of age got in touch with Unity in six Informatics courses with group sizes between 8 and 14 students each for approximately 40 course hours. In particular, we are interested in experiential factors that underlie students' perceived competence in coding in high school computer science. We conducted an evaluative qualitative content analysis of 21 semi-structured interviews among students in six high school Informatics courses. Self-determination theory (SDT) identifies competence, autonomy and relatedness as basic needs that underpin motivation. We evaluated in how far students expressed these needs in their reciprocal interviews. Further, we explored student statements to find out about factors influencing their perceived competence. We were specifically interested in students' future expectancy to get in contact with coding - which we attributed to the need for autonomy. According to our findings, most students were rather motivated to code in Unity. Yet, many did not express a future interest in (game) development. The majority of students expressed perceived competence in the programming tasks. A few students also explicitly mentioned relatedness as important learning factor. In line with SDT, relatedness appears to be important for students' ability to deal with frustration along the journey of learning to code. It is open to consideration in how far students' social environment - including student peers awareness of technology use in their current personal surroundings and possible future opportunities for getting in contact with coding in their lives - is deeply relevant to students' perceived competence in programming apart from coding tools, such as Scratch or Unity, and incentives, such as programming games.

This Full Paper in the Research-To-Practice Category presents a long-term study about the effects of a student-centered course on communication and professional skills on students' thoughts, attitudes, and behavior. The course is offered at a European university as part of a computer science master's program. This paper shares the design and challenges of a longitudinal study that reaches ten years behind and employs a mixed-methods approach. Besides presenting and interpreting the findings, we shed light on which features tend to stay on students' minds and impact their way of being and acting in society. Moreover, we suggest implications for the design and practice in comparable courses to maximize constructive, sustainable effects, such as improved active listening, presentation skills, and openness to other perspectives. These are essential (not only) for computer science professionals. Our findings suggest that the course provided significant learning for the vast majority of respondents, including aspects such as presenting while keeping the other side in mind, managing one's stress, and becoming less shy to speak up. All in all, we aim to contribute an evidence-based source of motivation for instructors in technically focused curricula who hold a student-centered stance.

Learning how to code by creating video games promises high motivation, engagement and fun for the students. In this study, the Unity Game Development Environment, a widely spread tool for professional game developers, was employed for teaching secondary school students to develop their own video games. The research design for the game development activities followed a Design-Based Research approach. The learning design was based on situated learning accompanied by a mix of tutorials, teacher explanations and support & collaboration amongst the students. The results of the first iteration of Design-Based Research confirmed the hypotheses that video game development was fascinating and engaging for the majority of young learners. Using a professional tool with an embedded physics engine provided additional attraction for teenagers. From the first cycle of game development we learned that dealing with the complexity of the development environment in a systematic way, time management, advanced teachers' competencies in handling the environment, and providing well balanced learning materials are crucial to successfully employ a professional tool like Unity in secondary education. Besides improved materials and a stepwise process of adding complexity e.g. by starting with developing mini-games, the most important change for the second cycle is to significantly extend the time allocated for game development. This seems justified due to the vast spectrum of skills and competences students tend to acquire when collaborating on complex and exciting issues like developing games.

This Research to Practice Full Paper represents the second comprehensive evaluation of the learning office, a pilot project introduced at a higher technical secondary school. The project has reached its third year and encompasses six of our twelve cohorts from grade 9 to grade 11. Students taking part in the learning office project have a more flexible course schedule, allowing them to choose time and scope for almost all of their school subject with some restrictions. The results revealed that the dropout rate could be reduced from 54% to 40% in the learning office over the first two years and also confirmed previous evaluations showing that students choosing the learning office approach struggle in their first year due to the change of systems. However, after they passed the first year, the overall subject-specific learning outcome shows no noteworthy differences. The learning office students of grade 11 even slightly outperformed their control group in some regards. This suggests that once the learning office students adapted to the new system, their gain in transversal, personal, and social skills do not happen at the cost of subject-specific competences, but is an additional asset improving our students' qualification to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

This Full Paper in the Research-To-Practice Category illustrates what a qualitative content analysis of students' online self-evaluations revealed about students' perceived learning and take-away from a student-centered, technology enhanced course on communication and professional skills. The course was offered in a computer science program as part of the Masters' program. As there is no doubt that graduates benefit from having developed advanced professional skills, it seems worthwhile to explore the ways to promote such skills effectively. In this paper we aim to share the insights we gained from performing a qualitative content analysis of students' written self-evaluations. These insights are twofold: getting to know the students' views about their learning and reflecting on the practice and information revealed by employing a qualitative content analysis. The findings indicate that a single student-centered course has the potential to motivate students to become better listeners, extend their perspective, and actively work on improving their interaction, even across cultural boundaries. With these findings in mind, we aim to share engaging and challenging educational practice and inspire, encourage, and call to action educators in the field of mediating professional skills in technically-focused curricula.

This Research to Practice Full Paper depicts and evaluates a school pilot project introducing student-centered classrooms for applied mathematics and software development at a higher technical secondary school. These student-centered classrooms are an alternative organizational form: If students choose to participate in the pilot project, they have non-traditional class schedules. Students can choose freely which subject they want to work on each day and visit the respective room, called “learning office”. Self-explanatory learning material is available in each learning office and students work independently on exercises and projects at their own pace and level, allowing them to specialize according to their personal interests. Teachers accompany pupils as coaches who help them plan and structure.The evaluation showed that students choosing the student-centered form need time, about half a year, to adapt to the change of system and thus perform worse in their first attempt at exams. However, after passing the first year, there is no notable difference in software development and only a weakly significant difference in applied mathematics. The average grades and passing rate of the two approaches show no notable differences. By cooperating significantly more frequently they develop social skills and show significantly higher motivation for attending school.

Despite their proven importance, team- and leadership competences tend to be highly underrepresented in Computer Science curricula. In order to support improving team performance in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) project teams, the rhea.framework of team leadership interaction has been developed by one of the authors. In this Research-to-Practice Full paper, the framework is briefly introduced and the students' experience with the rhea.framework in a student-centered Computer Science course at Master level is studied. We focus on the process of introducing the rhea.framework as an open educational resource and on students' experience of applying the framework for reflecting upon their team leadership interactions. Moreover, students were asked to evaluate the rhea.framework in light of their initial experience with it. While students suggested improvements on the rhea.framework, they appreciated the class on team leadership interaction. Consequently, the framework and scenario described in this paper is intended to encourage educators to include experiential learning into their courses and to research the effects. This can be done, for example, by reusing the rhea.framework and joining the authors in their endeavor to provide sustainable, significant learning on handling challenging interpersonal issues in ICT projects.

Can digital competencies be acquired by solving real problems? The educational intervention MadeByKids called an external educational provider to 17 schools to conduct a series of workshops, having pupils age 7 - 12 solve challenges such as designing the schoolbag 4.0 or the future classroom. The workshops were designed by adopting the Stanford Design Thinking Method for Kids (http://www.ideaco.org) and digital technologies with the goal to “teach” children computational thinking, collaborating in teams, resolving conflicts, presenting, giving/receiving feedback, etc. In this paper, we take a participatory action research (PAR) approach with the goal of exposing significant chunks of the incredibly rich experience. A content analysis of a qualitative survey among teachers and findings from a focus group reflect the teachers' view. The study indicates that the acquisition of digital competences needs to be backed by personal and social capacities that take time to mature. Furthermore, we learned that the children's teachers must be included consistently to ensure their cooperation and improve sustainability. Besides providing inspiration for teachers, implications for teacher education are derived and the national project is related to the findings from studies conducted abroad in order to contribute to constructive educational innovations crossing national boundaries.

Technical solution skills - though important - are not enough for effective, multicultural teamwork. Despite broad consensus on the vital function of communication- and social skills, they tend to be underrepresented in the training of software-engineers and project managers. This is partly because such skills are less explicit than technical methods, tools, and artefacts. To address this deficiency, an openly accessible web-based communication model for multicultural teams (comMCT) was developed. It consists of four modules addressing structural, functional, organizational, and interpersonal/behavioral aspects of multicultural communication. After presenting the empirically validated comMCT model, two scenarios of introducing comMCT into two academic courses within the computer science curriculum at the University of Vienna are discussed, along with the students' reactions and an online questionnaire capturing students' feedback on comMCT. In a nutshell, thoughtful, person-centered application of the model is expected to enhance learners' knowledge, practice, and reflection on communication issues and contribute to more effective and satisfied multicultural teams. Importantly, instructors as well as life-long learning program designers will find inspiration on including comMCT into their courses.

Soft skills, societal awareness and the ability to work in interdisciplinary teams are crucial traits for future software engineers. Still, these social skills seem to be underrepresented in the education of software engineers. To support a practical integration of such aspects also into education, a so-called “Diversity Framework” has been developed that helps to externalize implicit factors such as different work behaviors in project teams. This paper firstly presents this theoretic, empirically validated framework for externalizing and managing diverse work styles in information and communication technology (ICT) environments. Moreover, the paper examines how two student teams on an undergraduate level perceived the Diversity Framework in a qualitative focus group research setting. Furthermore, the results exemplify how the different teams approached the topic differently. Finally, this work provides suggestion for future research and an integration of the framework in academic software engineering education and life-long learning.

We present a case study on how a team of instructors put learner-centered principles into practice in a large undergraduate course on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that was run in 4 parallel groups of about 50 students. The course stands on the crossroads between software engineering, business, and research in so far as student-teams apply human-centered design techniques to develop mobile apps, test them with real end-users, read research papers and regularly reflect upon their experience. As a proof of the course-concept, selected results from formative and summative assessments are presented. The summative results show that students rated the course as one of the best of the 87 computer science courses run in the summer term of 2015 at the University of Vienna. The primary goal of this paper is to provide instructors intrigued by learner-centered approaches with ideas for their own practice. In particular, this paper is of interest to those who teach Human-Computer Interaction and to those who seek inspiration on mapping their course to the 14 learner-centered principles.

Traditionally, curriculum specifications tend to be formal, static documents, not encouraging adaptation and evolution. In order to facilitate various activities in implementing a curriculum, such as coordinating content, meta-cognitive competences, student-centered learning outcomes, this work proposes to employ a structured, Wiki-supported space. Our experience with this approach showed an improved transparency and coordination of courses based on a structured overview, a multi-faceted specification and increased sharing among teaching staff.

Ontologies are becoming popular in various communities. They give users the possibilities to understand, exchange, analyze or share knowledge of a specific domain. However ontologies can be very large and complex and therefore visualizations should help the user to understand and manipulate ontologies easily. Most visualizations concentrate on the structure of ontologies. For users, instances are often more interesting, because they represent the real world objects. This paper presents Knoocks (knowledge blocks) as a visualization approach which focuses on instances related to their structure. An evaluation which compared Knoocks with Jambalaya and CropCircles showed its benefits in visualizing instances.

Part decomposition and conversely, the construction of composite objects from individual parts have long been recognized as ubiquitous and essential mechanisms involving abstraction. This applies, in particular, in areas such as CAD, manufacturing, software development and computer graphics. Although the part-of relationship is distinguished in object oriented modeling techniques, it ranks far behind the concept of generalization/specialization and a rigorous definition of its semantics is still missing. We first show in which ways a shift in emphasis on the part-of relationship leads to analysis and design models that are easier to understand and to maintain. We then investigate the properties of part-of relationships in order to define their semantics. This is achieved by means of a categorization of part-of relationships and by associating semantic constraints with individual categories. We further suggest a precise and, compared with existing techniques, less redundant specification of constraints accompanying part-of categories based on the degree of exclusiveness and dependence of parts on composite objects. Although the approach appears generally applicable, the object oriented Unified Modeling Language (UMF) is used to present our findings. Several examples demonstrate the applicability of the categories introduced.

Although high-level data abstractions have been recognized as very important for modelling complex applications, one abstraction that is not widely incorporated into design methodologies is that of sets. This research analyzes sets as abstractions of individual members, in order to develop a list of criteria for a ‘good’ set modelling construct, referred to as a grouping. In addition, ways in which the member-of relationship, mapping individual members onto a set can be enriched with additional semantics, are proposed within an object-oriented context.

The power of any information system technology is delimited by the expressiveness of the notation used to represent information. Classification constitutes a fundamental notational structuring mechanism and, not surprisingly, is supported in one form or another by many formal notations intended for data or knowledge modelling. This paper presents an overview of various manifestations of classification mechanisms. Further, characteristic features of classification, such as the form of inheritance allowed from classes to instances, having single or multiple classifications and the structure of the classification hierarchy are identified, discussed, and contrasted. The paper also describes the classification mechanism offered by the knowledge representation language Telos. In Telos, classification is stratified and applicable not only to objects but also to (binary) relationships. The paper argues that these features lead to a more expressive notation, acquired at relatively modest conceptual and computational costs.