As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to make its presence felt in transforming workplaces around the world, and the Information Technology industry in particular, it is essential to understand its impact on the work practices of IT professionals, and the implications for computing students and curricula. This research project builds on work initiated jointly, in Sweden, New Zealand and Scotland, investigating concerns about the increasing impacts of Artificial Intelligence in IT Sector workplaces for employee work engagement and the implications for tertiary study, assessment and curricula in computing. "Work engagement", has been defined as the positive inner state where employees are fully present and engaged in their work, and is closely linked to motivation, learning, productivity, and accountability. Within the context of (Generative) AI at work, IT professionals have been noted as early adopters of AI. Their involvement in implementing and utilising AI technologies can provide valuable insights into the interplay between AI and work engagement. The implications for students are significant as future IT professionals, who must acquire and enhance competencies to adapt and thrive in digital workplaces.

Co-design methods and toolkits are commonly used to involve people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines in design processes, promoting collaboration, design thinking, shared decision making, and creativity. These methods and toolkits are generally tailored to in-person workshops supported by different physical artifacts (e.g. card-sets) in a shared physical location. Physical co-location and artifacts allow participants to interact in seamless ways, relying on everyday modalities of interaction. The CoViD-19 pandemic has forced many of such workshops online. This required transforming location, methods, toolkits and to rethink interaction among participants. With this workshop we aim to look back at these experiences of transformation and to reflect on the affordances of the physical and the virtual in co-design workshops. What are the challenges of transforming location, methods, and toolkits that are designed for in-person workshops into the digital? In which ways can in-person and virtual workshops co-exist and complement each other? We invite participants to share their experiences and reflect on how to bring together virtual and in-person co-design workshops.

During the last few decades, there has been a growing need for Professional Development of in-service teachers in Computer Science. This paper presents a systematic mapping of the research in this area published between 2010 and 2020. The study’s goal is to map existing literature, understanding how research is evolving and identifying gaps that can prompt new research. The literature mapping is based on the analysis of 206 articles collected from various online databases, then selected according to defined inclusion/exclusion criteria. The study investigates the type of intervention/study, school level, geographical location, connection to curricula, learning objectives, phase of the research, size of the study, and type of collaboration. From the literature mapping, Professional Development of in-service teachers of Computer Science emerges as a rapidly growing and dynamic research area. However, some threats are connected to fragmentation of the research and the need for more cooperation to increase inclusiveness and international collaboration.

Learning to program is often reported as challenging. Difficulties might be connected to, e.g., acquisition of core concepts like iteration, specific language constructs, and program design. Additionally, mastery of a programming language’s constructs does not consequently translate into solving new programming problems. These challenges have to be taken into account in the context of in-service teachers’ professional development (PD). In this paper, we address challenges teachers face when learning to program, considering these closely related questions: What do teachers perceive as difficult and how does this impact the perception of challenges their students will face? How does this influence the perception of teaching programming? The paper is based on the analysis of 178 reflection notes delivered by in-service teachers attending a university-level course on programming to identify issues related to the research questions. Out of the topics that we have selected from the literature as challenging for newcomers, the most difficult ones for teachers seem to be writing code and pseudocode to solve a specific problem. The easiest ones are understanding variable initialization and if statements. Also, teachers express that pupils will struggle with many aspects of programming and point to the complexity and students’ misconceptions inherent in several programming concepts such as loops. Our results suggest that it is not necessarily difficult to learn to program if in-service teachers are given paid time to learn.

Abstract Education is rapidly evolving from co-located settings to remote and online learning. However, many proven educational tools are designed for collaborative, co-located classroom work. Effective sketching and ideating tools, such as card-based workshop tools, cannot be applied in remote teaching. This paper explores how the paper-based card and playboard metaphor can be digitized for remote student co-creation via video call sessions. Therefore, a card-based toolkit for co-creating educational games is transformed into a digital representation for remote application. In a between-subject trial with two university student groups (n = 61), it is investigated how users perceive ideation/balancing support and applicability of the technology-enhanced card toolset compared to the paper-based variant. Both groups thereby created an analytic game concept for privacy education. The results remarkably revealed that remote co-creation using the technology-enhanced card and playboard in video call sessions was perceived as significantly more supportive for ideation and game concept balancing. Students also felt more confident to apply the digitized card toolset independently while being more satisfied with their created game concepts. The designed educational game concepts showed comparable patterns between the groups and disclosed the students’ preferences on how games for privacy education should be designed and when and where they would like to play them. Conclusively, design implications for digital card ideation toolsets were synthesized from the findings.

Code reuse is a widely accepted practice in software engineering. Not surprisingly, the practice is becoming more and more widespread also in the context of computing education. This paper explores the use of code reuse in secondary education, focusing on the challenges that are connected to formative assessment. The paper presents the results of an interview study with 12 teachers teaching computing in secondary schools. Teachers have been asked about their attitudes towards code reuse in education, challenges with formative assessment and code reuse, and best practices to address the identified challenges. The study shows that attitude and approaches towards code reuse in the classroom span wide. Some teachers are open and positive to include it as a practice, while others are more restrictive. Most of the reported challenges revolve around the dilemma between learners reusing code to be efficient and create complex programs, but at the expense of adequately learning and understanding what they do and practicing general and specific programming skills. The paper also presents some lessons learned that can be directly relevant for educators. some lessons learned that can be directly relevant for educators.

This paper presents and evaluates a model of project-based learning (PjBL) to train in-service teachers of programming. The paper contributes to the body of knowledge around in-service teachers' training to meet the growing demand for teachers being prepared to teach programming in different subjects and school levels. The aim is to design a course that prepares teachers to teach programming, is relevant, and increases their self-efficacy. To contribute to this, we suggest a PjBL approach where teachers create a teaching plan during a project. Teachers may bring in their disciplinary knowledge and pedagogy combined with traditional and instructional methods to design an artifact that can be used directly in their practice. In the proposed model, teachers' projects act as a bridge between training and practice. We implemented the first version of the model in 2019 and used this experience to revise the model described in this paper. The results show that teachers are mainly satisfied with this form of PjBL. Many are favorable to this approach and express joy in teaching programming as they feel prepared and, at the same time, understand that programming can be demanding to learn and teach. Therefore, they are also mentally prepared for what is to come.

A rising number of activities are aiming at promoting interest and learning of Computer Science among teenagers. The focus of these activities is often not only on learning but also on promoting engagement and interest. To achieve these goals, activities might adopt innovative learning approaches, e.g. multi-disciplinary problem-based learning, and technologies, like micro-processors and Internet of Things (IoT). A growing body of knowledge shows the potential benefits of these activities, which are often evaluated by students as fun and engaging. But does this motivate students to continue and learn more about the subject? In this paper we propose that affinity for technology (AFT) may play an important role in explaining teenagers' perception and intention to continue learning. Building on and extending the expectancy-value theoretical model, we examine the relationship between AFT and learning intentions. In particular, we assess whether subjective task values serve as explanatory links. The theorized model was tested with data obtained from a sample of 108 secondary school students (aged between 13-18) who participated in the same learning activity. Analyses were conducted using linear regression and the PROCESS macro in SPSS. Results revealed that AFT was positively related to continuous learning intentions, and this relationship was mediated by perceived usefulness, but not by enjoyment. Additionally, this relationship was not moderated by age or gender. These findings help to fill the missing link between AFT and continuous learning intentions by establishing perceived usefulness as an important mediating mechanism. The study can help educators by identifying an important factor affecting the intentions of students to continue learning.

The paper reports on a case study where four groups of lower secondary school students participated in a workshop and undertook the demanding role of designers of Internet of Things applications. In doing that, they made use of a dedicated inventor toolkit, which facilitated students' creative solutions to problems that can appear in the context of a smart city. From a pedagogical point of view, the workshop format is in line with the experiential learning approach. The paper presents a holistic student assessment methodology for this nice domain. In particular, to analyse the impact of the workshop for the students we used four different approaches: artefacts analysis of students' design solutions, classroom observations, a post-test and a survey. The results indicate that the intervention has promoted an effective teaching methodology for the basic conceptual and design aspects of the IoT for these lower secondary school students, but it hasn't addressed equally effectively the attitude-related aspects. Nonetheless, the participant students perceived the intervention as very satisfactory in terms of the IoT concept knowledge, smart cities learning, and problem-solving skills acquired, as well as in terms of enjoyment. The paper concludes on the learning gains of the intervention and discusses the motivation aspect for the teacher as well as for the students in this highly innovative learning experience.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues its expansion into homes, businesses and industries, the impact for Computer Science educators is increasingly evident. In 2017, the ITiCSE IoT working group identified relevant content, tools for teaching, and four IoT course types. The resulting report provided an entry point for educators challenged with setting up a new IoT course. The 2018 working group will build on this prior work by addressing feedback on the 2017 report and by examining the rapidly changing state-of-the-art in IoT. In particular, the working group will extend educators' ability to integrate IoT into curriculum by investigating additional content areas and pedagogical approaches.

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers new opportunities to invent technology-augmented things that are more useful, efficient or playful than their ordinary selves, yet only a few tools currently support ideation for the IoT. In this paper we present Tiles Cards, a set of 110 design cards and a workshop technique to involve non-experts in quick idea generation for augmented objects. Our tool aims to support exploring combinations of user interface metaphors, digital services, and physical objects. Then it supports creative thinking through provocative design goals inspired by human values and desires. Finally, it provides critical lenses through which analyze and judge design outcomes. We evaluated our tool in 9 ideation workshops with a total of 32 participants. Results show that the tool was useful in informing and guiding idea generation and was perceived as appealing and fun. Drawing on observations and participant feedbacks, we reflect on the strengths and limitations of this tool.

The Make2Learn workshop aims to explore the introduction in the learning processes of tools and methods for creative and joyful ideation, design and prototyping of Internet of Things (IoT) artifacts. Making IoT artefacts enable children to foster co-creativity and joy in learning processes and to construct knowledge; leading to STEM concepts. Making activities for IoT often have a broad perspective that includes not just digital fabrication, but also design thinking concepts such as problem elaboration, brainstorming, ideation and reflection. Make2learn aims to bring together a multidisciplinary group of experts for exploring how the intersection between the design, making, learning and IoT fields can accelerate the acquisition of 21st Century learning competences. During the workshop a set of tools and methods to engage children in ideation and prototyping of IoT artefacts will be demonstrated. Participants are also invited to bring and present their own tools. This will allow us to better understand and improve the value of Maker philosophy and the role of design and making IoT technologies to support teaching and learning.

Educators and researchers have been working to understand the reasons that may be contributing to high dropout rates, and low rates of participation, by females in the computer and information sciences discipline. Along the same lines, and propelled by the increased need for information technology (IT) professionals worldwide, we implemented a students' survey during the fall of 2015 in Norway's primary university for technological education. In this initiative we aim to identify reasons that may be contributing to high dropout rates, low rates of participation by females and aspects important for the efficient preparation of young people for careers in computer science and information technology. The results provide valuable insights and allow us to take appropriate measures for enhancing students' learning experience in the computer and information sciences.

The paper seeks to examine how existing communities in computing education thrive in Norway and manage to empower school pupils and tutors realising their role in the digital society, learn programming, and become familiar with Computer Science and Information Technology. Two semi-structured interviews were conducted with organisers and designers of activities that promote computing education and programming in Norway. Also, one focus group discussion was conducted with high school students that participated in a small number of learning activities on design thinking, programming and Internet of Things. The results were qualitatively analysed using the Grounded Theory in order to conclude how different aspects (cognitive, social, organisational, policy) are manifested and interweaved in these communities.

The special track “Motivating students with Mobiles, Ubiquitous applications and the Internet of Things for STEM (MUMI4STEM)”, within the “EDUCON20I7 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference”, integrates two main areas of interest in STEM education: I) motivating students with mobile devices and 2) exploiting ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things. Following the growing interest of the educational and research community towards fostering STEM education, this special session aims at promoting the discussion about the motivational aspects of mobile learning and the benefits of ubiquitous applications and the Internet of Things (IoT), with special focus on supporting STEM education.

Smart devices are everywhere, and the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution is only in its infancy. In the Internet of Things, everyday objects share data over networks, with or without human intervention. Self-driving cars, sensing thermostats, door locks, pet feeders, light bulbs, wearables of all kinds, and smart materials for manufacturing all belong to the new Internet of Things, applying sensors and cloud computing to allow for object-to-object communication. As computer science educators, we will soon be teaching students how to develop and maintain IoT technologies. This presents enormous challenges and even greater opportunities. How will we integrate IoT concepts and technologies into existing curricula? How will we handle the mix of software and hardware topics that most IoT projects involve? How will we deal with the legal, social, and ethical issues? How will we choose from the growing number of IoT industry standards? What kinds of equipment and lab spaces are optimal for small, medium, and large-scale programs, and how will we budget for all this? What are the opportunities for interdisciplinary studies? How will we leverage the enthusiasm students feel when they create projects that go beyond text, beyond graphics, beyond virtual reality, and into the tactile, three-dimensional, realm of moving real-world objects? In this working group, we study and document the current state of IoT education and interview educators with IoT teaching experience. We will then make recommendations to help educators integrate IoT topics in computer science curricula.

The Workshop of Making as a Pathway to Foster Joyful Engagement and Creativity in Learning (Make2Learn) aims to discuss the introduction of creative and joyful production of artifacts in the learning processes. A variety of environments have been developed by researchers to introduce making principles to children. Making principles enable them foster co-creativity and joy in learning processes and construct knowledge. By involving children in the design decisions they begin to develop technological fluency and the needed competences, in a joyful way. Make2Learn aims to bring together international researchers, educators, designers, and makers for the exploration of making principles towards the acquisition of 21st Century learning competences, by employing the state of the art aspects of learning technologies, new media, gaming, robotics, toys and applications. Make2Learn aims to develop a critical discussion about the well-established practices and technologies of the maker movement, and expected outcomes of putting them into practice under different spaces such as Hackerspaces, Makerspaces, TechShops, FabLabs etc. This will allow us to better understand and improve the value of Maker philosophy and the role of entertainment technologies to support teaching and learning.

Recent technology advances support the interconnection of smart objects, enabling their communication according to the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. IoT is promising important changes in our lives. The opportunities offered by such technologies can be amplified, by investigating new approaches that, thanks to high-level abstractions, can enable non-expert users to compose data and functionality of things, as well as the communication among them, by means of "natural" composition paradigm. Today, in fact, this is a prerogative almost always reserved to developers who, through the use of specific programming languages, provide pre-packaged solutions to users. The workshop aims at stressing the Human-Computer Interaction perspective, i.e., it acknowledges the importance of enabling even non-technical users to manipulate data and functionality of things in a simple and natural way.

We present the groundwork for Tiles: an inventor toolbox to support the development of interactive objects by non-experts. Tiles is composed by (i) a set of physical input/output primitives to describe interaction styles with technology-augmented objects, (ii) extensible hardware modules easily embeddable in everyday things that implement the primitives, (iii) APIs to code application logics using popular programming languages. We are currently exploring the opportunities of using Tiles to develop applications for learning, games and advanced visual interfaces.

To help SE student teams learn from their project process, we propose the use of facilitated postmortem workshops in which each team reconstructs its project timeline. Individual team memberspsila experience of the project is included by team members drawing individual dasiaexperience curvespsila along the timeline. The approach is based on current industry practice and adapted in accordance with theory on reflection and learning. We present the detailed design of the workshops as they were implemented in an undergraduate SE project course as well as some recommendations for future workshops. The workshops are effective for promoting active participation, constructing a shared representation of the project process, and revisiting project issues from multiple perspectives. Evaluation showed that students were satisfied with the workshop and motivated to use the approach in later projects.

In this paper we report on our experience using a blog to support teacher education. The system has been used to support communication and reflection while students were spending a period of teaching practice. The system has not been used, despite its potential usefulness. In this paper we reflect on this experience to identify strengths and weaknesses of blogs in supporting learning in the field.

Creating and maintaining a shared information space is an integral part of a learning community development. Computer-based tools such as Web forums and discussion groups have been widely used for such support. The usage of 3D collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) has also been advocated because these systems might better capture the three-dimensional nature of human memory. In this paper we describe our experience of creating a FAQ in a university course on a Web-forum and a 3D CVE and provide recommendations for design of information spaces in 3D CVEs.

In this paper we present the experiences of usage of Viras, a collaborative virtual environment for social awareness support in educational settings. Collaborative Virtual environments (CVE) have lately been used for learning in different contexts, and offer promising possibilities for supporting social awareness. In our study, we look at how students evaluate CVE in educational settings and investigate the importance of different factors on social awareness.

Social awareness is essential for effective learning. However, natural environments do not always provide optimal support for it. We look at the potentials of collaborative virtual environments (CVE) in this context and provide a set of requirements for educational CVEs based on the needs of learning communities. We also present a prototype based on these requirements.

The last decade has witnessed a growing interest in what technology can do to sustain communities. Within the Campiello project innovative information technologies have been adopted to support the dynamic exchange of experiences among people living in cities with high levels of tourism, in this way reducing the progressive diminishing of identity suffered by the local communities of these cities. The system developed has been used, for an experimental period, in a neighborhood of Venice, Italy. In the paper, we reflect on the whole Campiello experience, considering all its development phases. These reflections are organized as a set of issues that require attention, respectively, in the design and deployment of community systems, illustrated with examples from Campiello. We believe that due to the relative novelty of community systems, this type of reflection is important to inform the design of future systems such that they better fulfill their objectives and become an integral part of community practices.