This research explores computing educators' perspectives on integrating Virtual Reality (VR) to support teaching and learning in higher education computing. Using a systematic review, VR design workshops, and an in-the-wild implementation, it identifies curriculum areas, practical considerations, and develops a framework to support effective, pedagogically-aligned VR integration in computing classrooms.

Virtual Reality (VR) offers immersive, experiential learning experiences in computing education, however, its successful integration in classrooms require navigating a range of practical organizational and pedagogical challenges. This poster presents insights drawn from post-hoc educator interviews, and researcher reflections, who collaboratively deployed an 'in-the-wild' VR-based lesson in a higher education IT Professional Practice course. Our findings highlight several planning, logistical and class orchestration aspects that influence VR integration, rarely captured in controlled VR studies. We also draw attention to the importance of research aspects such as establishing partnerships with teaching teams, being flexible with classroom dynamics, educator safety and iterative refinements for sustainable VR integration. These findings can provide practical guidance for computing educators and researchers seeking to implement or study VR in authentic contexts.

In this paper, we present teaching material and resources designed as part of a research project aiming to investigate how computing educators operationalize the delivery of Virtual Reality (VR) based lessons to teach accessibility and inclusion in an undergraduate IT Professional Practice course in an Australian research-intensive university. The material, first employed across seven, 2-hour applied sessions in Semester 1, 2024, was offered to 390 students by a teaching team of 15 staff members and it has been iteratively refined and offered to 2350 students by 87 teachers over four semesters since then. In post-lesson interviews, educators perceived mixed impacts on student learning highlighting enhanced engagement and awareness alongside challenges related to uneven student reception and relevance. They commended the VR team's clear planning and hands?on support for enabling smooth in-class delivery.

Evidence supports offering research experiences for undergraduate computing science students as a means of broadening participation in computing[7, 10, 11]. However, student perceptions about computing science research, how students become interested in these research experiences, and the details of effective design and delivery of programs capable of attracting and retaining this interest are less explored. In this study, we investigate the design and delivery of undergraduate research programs. We expand on and explore several factors, including but not limited to cultural relevance, the presence of a cross-disciplinary high-level view, task assignment, entry point, and support elements of a program.

The use of Emerging Technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Learning Analytics (LA) and Extended Reality (XR) applications, in higher education has proliferated in recent times, as these technologies are considered to have a significant impact on the future of postsecondary teaching and learning. We wanted to find out the emerging technologies used in computing education, its evaluation and effectiveness, and limitations and gaps for future research. We carried out a Systematic Literature Review study on the use of Emerging Technologies in higher education computing education to identify the state of the art in the use of these three groups of technologies for assessment and feedback practices. After systematic search and filtering from a search pool of 3038 studies published between 2016 and 2021, we selected 38 articles for detailed meta-analysis. Our findings reveal that 71% of the reviewed studies are journal articles, 50% studies focus on learning analytics, and the majority of the studies employ quantitative approaches. The results from this systematic review suggest that XR technologies have received least attention to date in computing education (amongst the emerging technologies considered for the review) and there is a lack of frameworks for design, evaluation and use of emerging technologies in higher education. The findings of this review will be beneficial for researchers and educators to obtain an in-depth understanding of the main areas of application of emerging technologies in higher education computing education, an inventory of emerging technology tools used for assessment and feedback, effectiveness indicators, and evaluation approaches that have been used. For evidence-based guidance on future assessment and feedback practices using emerging technologies, we also present a brief research agenda, drawing attention to the need to trial more XR, focus on formative assessment and feedback practices, better understand impact of human-centric issues and take more thoughtful consideration of ethics in the use of emerging technologies in computing education.