Digital solutions can support survivors of childhood critical illness by preventing psychological and social issues. To identify the solutions this user group needs and prefers, a mixed-method case study was conducted. The study involved Norwegian children aged 5–16 years diagnosed with Hirschsprung’s disease or anorectal malformation. It included 14 co-design workshops with a child-parent dyad and one nurse, incorporating interactions with an app, a social robot, and virtual reality. Thematic analysis indicated seven needs: (1) providing an anonymization option, (2) offering information about the illness, (3) connecting people in similar circumstances, (4) meeting user expectations, (5) ensuring safety of use, (6) facilitating interactions, and (7) creating an enjoyable experience. Quantitative data indicated a statistically significant variation in time spent across the three technologies. The children spent significantly more time in virtual reality than with the robot. These insights may help design better digital health solutions supporting psychosocial factors.

The underrepresentation of women in the software engineering field remains a challenge in both academia and industry. While enrollment numbers remain low, there is also limited research on how responsibilities and roles are distributed within student software development teams, particularly through a gendered lens. This study aims to address this gap by investigating the relationship between team gender composition, female leadership, and the distribution of technical roles among women in SE teams. We analyze data from 628 students—183 of whom were women—across 85 software development teams over seven years. Through predictive analysis, we test three hypotheses: (1) whether women in teams with fewer female members are less likely to assume highly specialized technical roles, (2) whether the presence of a woman in a leadership position increases the likelihood of other women taking on highly technical roles, and (3) whether the distribution of roles among women varies across different student cohorts. Our findings provide partial support for the first and third hypotheses. Women are generally less likely than men to occupy highly specialized technical roles; however, this likelihood is not significantly influenced by the gender ratio within teams. Similarly, while role diversification among women has increased over time—particularly in positions such as Scrum Master and Report Manager—this trend appears to be driven more by declining male participation in certain roles than by increased female engagement. Contrary to our second hypothesis, having a woman as team leader does not significantly impact the likelihood of women assuming highly technical roles. The insights from this study contribute to a deeper understanding of gender dynamics in SE education and highlight the importance of fostering inclusive environments that support diverse role exploration and long-term engagement for women in software engineering.

Augmented reality (AR) provides numerous opportunities for digitally-aided language interventions for autistic children.Educators and researchers have reported a variety of outcomes and insights about the use of AR as an educational and pedagogical tool.The unique advantage of AR suggests that it supports attentional behaviour, fosters emotional and social skills, and improves communication abilities in children with autism.However, the efficacy of this technology for language learning in autistic children has not previously been systematically reviewed.The purpose of this review was to summarise findings on AR-enhanced language learning interventions for autistic children to help guide researchers in future studies.We conducted a systematic literature review, collecting 44 peer-reviewed studies covering different language domains.From there, further analysis identified 13 studies that focused on language acquisition and 31 that focused on language use.Our survey presents an overview of AR research for language learning in autistic children over the last 10 years, providing insights into aspects of language skills, the AR technologies used, research design and strategies, the underlying learning theories and models adopted in the studies, and whether the reported results were accompanied by some form of evaluation.Finally, this review proposes several recommendations for future research.

Abstract: Software sustainability has been a trending topic in the last decade in academia. Studies related to software sustainability propose models, frameworks, or practices that can be applied in the industry. But most of these proposals are still not systematically adopted in the industry. Therefore, there is an opportunity to create a structured meeting to support the concrete adoption of sustainability practices in software development. This paper aims to provide an overview of these frameworks and how they can help facilitate sustainability-driven meetings (SusDM). Seeking this, we present practical examples and a workflow to prepare the meeting by applying the existing sustainability frameworks in SusDM. As a position paper, our hypothesis is that the contributions of this meeting may be related to improving the knowledge of software developers on sustainable software engineering, discovering new sustainability requirements, prioritization, and implementing software sustainability prac (More)

Gender stereotypes can harm children well being, impact on their career path an also led to discrimination behaviour. Our research aims at challenging children’s gender stereotypes and exploring how a Digital StoryTelling tool can be be designed to detect these at early age. Based on the literature review we have developed a prototype named Genderalize that aims at stimulating children’s reflection on their stereotypes. The tool was developed in a co-design process involving nine experts in children-computer interaction. The final version was tested by nine the adults stakeholders (e.g. guardians, parents, teachers). The outcomes provide thoughtful considerations on how Genderalize helped the detection of gender stereotypes by the means of a contextualised narrative and the reflective exercises. Results’ impact was limited due to the small sample, but the outcomes were very useful to move on to the next step of the project and inspire new developments.

Women are underrepresented in Computer Science disciplines at all levels, from undergraduate and graduate studies to participation and leadership in academia and industry. Increasing female representation in the field is a grand challenge for academics, policymakers, and society. [1]. The lack of women is among the core reasons for the huge skills and talent gap existing between the number of graduates in higher education institutions and the number of job positions available in the ICT Industry in Europe. The main questions are: How to have more girls choosing computer science as their higher education studies and profession; How to retain female students and assure they finish their studies and start successful careers in the field; How to encourage more female Ph.D. and postdoctoral researchers to remain in the academic career and apply for professorships in computer science departments; How to support and inspire young women in their careers and help them to overcome the main hurdles that prevent women from reaching senior positions in industry and public sector. Which communication and dissemination strategy to adopt in this field. The lecture presents statistics about female presence in education, research and industry. Moreover, it presents research issues from projects at NTNU and other from other international partners mainly in EUGAIN.

Nowadays, software permeates almost every aspect of our lives. To produce complex and large-scale software products, a large number of software engineers are required. Accordingly, researchers and educators recognize the importance of Software Engineering Education (SEE), and many studies related to SEE have been published in recent years. To synthesize the large amount of research in SEE, some Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) focusing on different areas of SEE have been conducted and reported. However, due to their limited focuses, none of these SLRs is able to depict an overall state-of-the-art for SEE. To remedy this, we conducted a tertiary study on SEE, which identifies 26 relevant SLRs published between 2004 and 2019. By classifying and positioning these SLRs in two dimensions, i.e. the education methods/tools applied for SEE and the research topics related to SEE, we present a landscape of SEE, which locates the SLRs on SEE and their research dimensions. Further, we collected the issues studied in the published research and those that need to be addressed for instructors. This paper also discusses the challenges of the current SEE research landscape.

The continuous adoption and evolution of technology in all aspects and areas of our lives and our environment entails new and complex challenges and asks for interdisciplinary perspective to avoid biases that affect sustainable development. In today’s digital, automated, and globally connected society, digitization and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are among the fields that are taking the most relevance attention and societal impacts. The new technological development they imply and their use by an increasing part of the world population demonstrate that they must be driven by and for all people in society (across gender, culture, nationality, and other kinds of discrimination), protecting and achieving a positive impact on the environment, as well as a sustainable economy for all. Although the challenge is evident, progress has been invariably slow and addressed from isolated perspectives. The hUGe2research program aims to address sustainability in and by technology (focusing on digitization and AI), analyzing from an interdisciplinary perspective the casuistry and existing discrimination (mainly due to gender imbalance, geographical inequalities, and lack of citizens’ engagement), and proposing new ways to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) tackling the intersectional challenges. To do this, it will be centered around four PhD students and their supervisors, which will investigate common case studies and data sets from different scientific perspectives.

Context: This full research paper presents an experience-based course designed around a semester-long external Innovation Bootcamp. Objective: We evaluated the impact of the Innovation Bootcamp on students' learning and startup formations, measuring how it affected students' perceived challenges related to technical skills, soft skills, project management, and startup-formation mindsets. Method: We conducted design-based research comprising questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups with students and stakeholders participating in the Innovation Bootcamp. In total, 44 students answered the questionnaires conducted before and after the Innovation Bootcamps in both academic years. In the second year, 12 students answered the Berkeley Innovation Index questionnaire to measure their innovation mindsets. We also conducted four individual interviews (student cohort 1), four focus group interviews (student cohort 2), and six individual interviews with stakeholders participating in the Innovation Bootcamp in both years. Results: We found that perceptions of challenges regarding soft and project-management skills declined, while perceptions of challenges regarding technical skills did not vary during the course. Students exhibited increased motivation to engage in startup formation following close collaboration with external stakeholders only after developing their first minimum viable product. Contribution: The study's outcomes contribute to validating a new team-centered model that facilitates startup formation in experience-based courses. We also intend to help educators and researchers adopt Innovation Bootcamps in experience-based, software engineering-focused courses.

Context: Customer-driven courses have been a classic approach in teaching software engineering for over four decades at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The main goal of these courses is close collaboration between students and customers. However, in this scope of work, the intent was to evaluate students' perception of skills acquisition, startup formation mindset, and the introduction of external activities. Objectives: Several aspects were investigated, which include how collaboration with external customers affects student skills in a customer-driven course, how collaboration with external customers affects students' motivation in startup formation, and how students perceive the introduction of an external Innovation Bootcamp activity at the start of the course. Method: Twelve semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted with 86 students. Furthermore, an inductive thematic analysis was performed, which utilized open coding of the interview transcripts. Results: Students reflected an improvement in technical, soft, and project management skills. It was found that many of the customers' projects were not eligible for becoming startups due to the nature of the project niche scope closely related to the customer needs. Motivations in startup formation rely heavily on individual students' mindsets, and many of the teams had a weak perception about startup formation within the existing course context. The overall observation from the focus group interviews was that introducing external activities such as Innovation Bootcamp could assist in the process of startup formation and elevate the projects' relevance and quality. Contribution: The study's findings contribute to the course's future improvement while introducing external activity. The outcome could promote student innovation and active participation in customer project proposals and end-product features. Educators and researchers can benefit from the findings of our study in regard to making future updates to their customer-driven courses. There is also potential to increase practitioners' awareness of positive student input in their project proposals.

Context: Approaches to teaching software engineering are becoming more interdisciplinary and team-centered, similar to a startup practice context. Therefore, educators must have an adequate framework for supporting software engineering teaching through startup practice. However, only a meager set of existing frameworks introduce startup practice to teach software engineering. Aim: Our study aims to develop and validate a framework for teaching software engineering through startup practice in higher education. Method: We developed a framework for introducing startup practices in software engineering education. We first identified the framework domains (course teaching and design perspectives, course theoretical lens, and course design and interaction practices) based on a previous literature review pinpointing lean software startups as part of software engineering education research. We further identified dimensions for each domain based on investigations in both our software engineering experience-based course and growth phase startup context. Finally, we validated the framework using a Delphi method. Results: We found that the perception of the framework dimensions was positive among the experts who, on average, rated 14 out of 19 dimensions as highly important (approximately 75%) and the rest (25%) as of average importance. From the current results, we are able to deduce that our proposed framework can provide realistic learning expectations for SE students but also for other disciplines that can relate to software engineering. Contribution: The study's outcomes contribute to developing and validating a framework for teaching software engineering through startup practice in higher education. Our framework lays a foundation for educators and researchers by successfully combining experience-based software engineering courses with lean software startup industry practices. Furthermore, our framework contributes to students acquiring adequate professional skills to address societal challenges with a mindset focused on increased innovation and startup formation.

Software has become ubiquitous in every corner of modern societies. During the last five decades, software engineering has also changed significantly to advance the development of various types and scales of software products. In this context, Software Engineering Education plays an important role in keeping students updated with software technologies, processes, and practices that are popular in industries. We investigate from literature the extent Software Engineering Education addresses major Software Engineering Trends in the academic setting. We conducted a systematic mapping study about teaching major Software Engineering Trends in project courses. We classified 126 papers based on their investigated Software Engineering Trends, specifically Software Engineering processes and practices, teaching approaches, and the evolution of Software Engineering Trends over time. We reveal that Agile Software Development is the major trend. The other Trends, i.e., Software Implementation, Usability and Value, Global Software Engineering, and Lean Software Startup, are relatively small in the academic setting, but continuously growing in the last five years. System of Systems is the least investigated among all Trends. The study points out the possible gaps between Software Industry and Education, which implies actionable insights for researchers, educators, and practitioners.

Gender stereotyping in child development and education is a known issue but as yet little attention has been given to the design for change, or at least attenuate, stereotypical thinking. In our research we explored how Digital StoryTelling (DST) could support children in their awareness of negative gender stereotypes. Following a participatory design-inspired approach we involved 43 participants; children and adults (teachers and experts in the domain), in three workshops with the purpose of exploring this design space. Here, we describe this full process and its outcomes: nine concepts to guide the design of a DST tool. The workflow and toolbox used during the process are instances of an approach that could be replicated in other contexts and/or to challenge other types of stereotypes. The main contribution of our research is towards the design for change with and for children. We hope that our work will inspire members of our community to address these issues.

Context: Software startups are software-intensive early-stage companies with high growth rates. We notice little evidence in the literature concerning engineering practices when startups transition to the growth phase. Aim: Our goal is to evaluate how software startups embrace software engineering practices. Methodology: We conduct a survey guided by semi-structured interviews as an initial step, to be followed by field questionnaires as part of a future exploratory study. We use open coding to identify patterns leading to themes we use to state our hypotheses. To identify our samples, we use purposive sampling. Results: Specifically, we analyze seven startup cases during the first qualitative phase. We obtain five anti-patterns (no-documentation, no-agile, no-code intellectual property protection, cowboy programming, no-automated testing) and corresponding patterns (readable code, ad-hoc project management, private code repositories, paired and individual programming, ad-hoc testing) in adopting software engineering practices. We state 10 corresponding hypotheses we intend to corroborate by surveying a more significant number of software startups. Contribution: This study, throughout its recommendations, provides an initial road map for software startups in the growth phase, allowing future researchers and practitioners to make educated recommendations.

We added a Bootcamp external activity to our experiential-based course for first-year master students of Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Students engaged with realistic challenges from stakeholders while participating in the Bootcamp. We aimed to evaluate this year’s student motivation in startup formation. We followed a mixed-methods approach combining data from a questionnaire and interviews. From the questionnaire, we found that the motivations regarding dimensions, such as startup formation increases, and the involvement of existing team members slightly decreased after Bootcamp. The interviews show that involving others–-not only the existing team members–-and having better funding opportunities are deemed crucial in future startup formations. The involvement in the startup formation of the existing stakeholders is still at a marginal level. The overall outcomes of the study help educators and researchers make educated decisions in relation to introducing startup formation within intensive software engineering experiential-based courses.

Context: This full research paper presents an experience-based course designed around a semester-long external Innovation Bootcamp activity. Objective: We sought to evaluate the impact of Innovation Bootcamp on students' learning and startup formation. To this end, we measured how the Innovation Bootcamp affected students' perceived challenges related to technical, soft project management skills and the startup formation mindset. Method: We conducted a cohort study comprising questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups with both students and stakeholders participating in the Innovation Bootcamp. In total, 44 students participated in the questionnaires run before and after the Innovation Bootcamps during both academic years. Moreover, we conducted four individual interviews (student cohort 1), four focus group interviews (student cohort 2), and six individual interviews with different stakeholders participating in the Innovation Bootcamp during both years. Results: We find that perceptions of challenges regarding soft and project management skills drop, while perceptions regarding technical skills challenges do not vary during the course. Students exhibit increased motivation to engage in startup formation following close collaboration with external stakeholders only after developing their first minimum viable product. Contribution: The overall outcomes of the study contribute to validating a new course design model, which will help develop a course framework to help future educators, researchers, and practitioners adopt Innovation Bootcamp activities within a software engineering-focused experience-based course.

Context: Startups aim at scaling their business, often by developing innovative products with limited human and financial resources. The development of software products in the startup context is known as opportunistic, agility-driven, and with high tolerance for technical debt. The special context of hardware startups calls for a better understanding of state-of-the-practice of hardware startups’ activities. Objective: This study aimed to identify whether and how startups can achieve product quality while maintaining focus on agility. Method: We conducted an exploratory study with 13 hardware startups, collecting data through semi-structured interviews and analysis of documentation. We proposed an integrative model of agility and quality in hardware startups. Results: Agility in hardware startups is complex and not achieved through adoption of fast-paced development practices alone. Hardware startups follow a quality-driven approach for development of core components, where frequent user testing is a measure for early debt management. Hardware startups often lack mindset and strategies for achieving long-term quality in early stages. Conclusions: Hardware startups need attention to hardware quality to allow for evolutionary prototyping and speed. Future research should focus on defining quality-driven practices that contribute to agility, and strategies and mindsets to support long-term quality in the hardware startup context.

Child marriage is any marriage where one or both of the participants is under the age of 18. Today, more than 12 million such marriages happen every year [11]. Giving children and the communities around them access to information about the dangers of child marriage is crucial in order to change the cultural norms that enable and perpetuate it. Mobile applications have so far seen sparse use to combat this problem. This paper covers a project that looks to evaluate the effect of different design options for mobile applications in this field. It covers seven different design approaches, as well as the testing and evaluation of these in a case study amongst youth in Malawi. During Spring 2019, an initial testing round will be held there in cooperation with Plan International. There, we will gather feedback from local youths on what they know and think about child marriage, as well as seeing how they interact with the designs we have made.

Gender is a major variable affecting identity and life opportunities from a young age. Our research aims to explore the persistence of gender stereotypes in multimedia stories created by children with the final purpose of attenuating this stereotypical thinking by proposing new processes and tools. The paper investigates the following research question: how can gender stereotypes be detected in the stories produced by children with Digital StoryTelling? We addressed this issue by analyzing 23 multimedia stories created by 83 children, aged 11-12 years. The main contribution of our work is an evaluation methodology to detect gender stereotypes.

Self-evaluation is the ability to assess one's work, and is a key element in the psycho-pedagogical development of children with special needs in their path towards autonomy and self-determination. Acquiring this skill requires explicit training and materials, and it is often cumbersome and time-consuming. In this paper we present a study to ascertain to what extent systems based on Augmented Reality (AR) are a suitable and less expensive alternative to help children with cognitive disabilities to train self-evaluation skills in special education schools. For this purpose, we have developed tablet application (BART) that offers assistance to children with special needs to self-evaluate basic arithmetic operations. The system was designed through the involvement of 2 educators, 2 experts on psycho-pedagogy, and 2 software designers. The contribution of this paper is the description of BART, an innovative system for children with special needs and a concrete plan for an empirical study that is to be carried out on a short-term basis. Here we describe the methodology that is to be applied to the proposed study and outline the main expectations about the results and their implications in the issue of self-evaluation skills acquisition for children in special education.

Project-based learning has been introduced in many university courses as a dynamic classroom approach that motivates active exploration of real-world problems. It is also proven as one of the most effective ways for students to acquire practical skills and deeper knowledge. However, while learning with technologies in project-based blended environments, students are expected to know how to cope with real-world complex issues. Hence, students from two universities participated in an exploratory study with a focus in motivational and emotional challenges as part of collaborative learning. In particular, the study explored what regulation strategies students practiced as an answer to the challenges they encountered in customer-driven project-based learning activities. Nonetheless, the broad idea is to understand in what ways collaborative learning can be beneficial or debilitating for students' progress, and how technology can support or influence positive outcomes.

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) show difficulties in reading skills acquisition with syllabic methods (used in ordinary schools). So that, specific learning methodologies are needed. Thanks to their good visual competences, global reading methods seem to be very useful. This paper presents a technology-driven serious game, based on global reading methodologies and personalized experience to promote children' first contact with literacy skills. This app is called "Leo con Lula" ("reading with Lula", in Spanish) and it is available on mobile platforms.

The fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), computer gaming and activities with digital technologies associated with the Maker movement are still dominated by a rather homogeneous group of (mostly white male) people though there are numerous initiatives and research attempting to change this. With this workshop we aim to bring together researchers, designers, educators and practitioners in IDC to share experience and explore how we can shape and create (learning) environments and tools to sustainably engage girls of diverse backgrounds and all ages in STEM, gaming and Making.

In this paper we present a serious game about collaborative storytelling in an effort to promote and give an outlet for empathy. It uses smartphones to provide cues and to visualize a story structure. This way, players will invent a story together. They have to play by turns, so this facilitates the empathic response inherent in both hearing and telling stories.

Computational thinking and coding has received considerable attention over the past several years. Considerable efforts worldwide suggest the need for more empirical studies providing evidence-based practices to introduce and engage children with coding activities. The main goal of this study is to examine which programming concepts students use when they want to develop a game, and what is the interrelation among these concepts. To achieve our goal, a field study was designed and data were collected from coding activities. In detail, during a two-week period, one-day workshops were organized almost every day on which 44 children participating in, with ages between 8-17. The workshops follow a constructionist approach and comprise of two parts. First the children interact with robots, and then develop a game using Scratch. The findings provide a deeper understanding on how children code by showing the use of specific programming concepts to develop their projects and their correlations. Hence, we improve our knowledge about children's competences in coding.

Educating social innovators in higher education is of great importance as many societal challenges exist. This study combines experiential learning with ICT tools to provide students with the needed competences and experiences to solve societal challenges. We employ this approach in an innovative course, named Experts in Teamwork (EiT), which follows the experiential learning cycle. The participants of this study are undergraduate students interested to learn how they can solve societal challenges. Specifically, 26 students with various background and nationalities participated. A collaborative platform was developed that supports teamwork and cooperation, as well as the social innovation process. The findings show that this approach can influence positively learning outcomes and increase students' engagement and motivation with both social innovation and the learning process. Also, students' creativity was increased leading to the development of better solutions. The overall outcomes contribute to theoretical and practical development, to allow educators to take appropriate measures to enhance students' learning experience and foster social innovation through ICT.

Computational thinking and coding is gradually becoming an important part of K-12 education. Most parents, policy makers, teachers, and industrial stakeholders want their children to attain computational thinking and coding competences, since learning how to code is emerging as an important skill for the 21st century. Currently, educators are leveraging a variety of technological tools and programming environments, which can provide challenging and dynamic coding experiences. Despite the growing research on the design of coding experiences for children, it is still difficult to say how children of different ages learn to code, and to cite differences in their task-based behaviour. This study uses eye-tracking data from 44 children (here divided into "kids" [age 8-12] and "teens" [age 13-17]) to understand the learning process of coding in a deeper way, and the role of gaze in the learning gain and the different age groups. The results show that kids are more interested in the appearance of the characters, while teens exhibit more hypothesis-testing behaviour in relation to the code. In terms of collaboration, teens spent more time overall performing the task than did kids (higher similarity gaze). Our results suggest that eye-tracking data can successfully reveal how children of different ages learn to code.

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.

During the last few years, the development of tools for learning programming in primary and secondary schools (shortly K-12) has reached a significant turning point. This study reviews the published papers on the field of tangible programming languages (TPLs) in K-12 schools in order to summarize the findings, guide future studies and give reflections for design and practice. From a systematic literature search 12 TPL peer-reviewed articles were collected and analyzed. Results of this short survey show that designers should emphasize on TPLs unambiguous manipulations, and consider clear mappings between tangible and virtual commands. Despite the challenges, the studies reviewed suggest that implementing programming lessons in K-12 education using TPL could be an enjoyable and effective learning experience.

This study aims to identify the interrelations among performance expectancy, effort expectancy, enjoyment, and satisfaction in order to predict high intention to use a mobile application for educational services. To this end a mobile application was developed which includes important services for students in one place and it was tested through feedback from questionnaires. Building on complexity and configuration theory we present a conceptual model and employ fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine how performance expectancy, effort expectancy, enjoyment, and satisfaction combine in order to explain high and low intention to use mobile learning. The results indicate different configurations of the examined factors that explain user behavior, and verify the existence of asymmetric relations among them. The study is one of the first in the area evaluating a mobile learning application, and has both theoretical and practical implications towards the development, design and provision of mobile learning applications.

This study uses complexity theory to understand the causal patterns of factors that stimulate students’ intention to continue studies in computer science (CS). To this end, it identifies gains and barriers as essential factors in CS education, including motivation and learning performance, and proposes a conceptual model along with research propositions. To test its propositions, the study employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on a data sample from 344 students. Findings indicate eight configurations of cognitive and noncognitive gains, barriers, motivation for studies, and learning performance that explain high intention to continue studies in CS. This research study contributes to the literature by (1) offering new insights into the relationships among the predictors of CS students’ intention to continue their studies and (2) advancing the theoretical foundation of how students’ gains, barriers, motivation, and learning performance combine to better explain high intentions to continue CS studies.

With the proliferation of programming languages for children (i.e., Scratch, Alice, Kodu) combined with programmable hardware (i.e., Arduino, 3D printers, robots); efforts to provide evidence based best practices for introducing and engaging children in programming is urgently needed. In this work-in-progress we present the early results of an empirical investigation, regarding students' attitudes towards the creative learning context, and the differences between female and male students. The context is a workshop program, implemented by a group of computer science researchers and artists, with the purpose to introduce young students' programming through creative and meaningful experiences. Hundred and twenty-eight 15-years old students participated to the program. The empirical evaluation is implemented by a post-survey with 105 respondents, and organized around six attitudes: Satisfaction; Intention to use; Enjoyment; Easiness; Usefulness; and Learning Performance. Quantitative data analysis show that there is significant difference between the two genders and that the attitudes have significant relations between them.

Research in the area of Computer Science (CS) education, has focused on identifying the reasons that students do not finish their studies in CS. Although there is increasing demand for CS professionals, there is not enough knowledge to explain the high dropout rates in CS education. This study aims to empirically examine how students' intention to complete their studies (retention) in CS is affected by variables playing a key role in higher education. By identifying which variables contribute to dropout in CS studies, we will be able to focus on how to improve aspects related with them in order to reduce dropout rates. To do so we identified the following variables: Year of studies, Gender, Age, Students' Effort, Absence from Classes, Expected Grade point average (GPA), and Current GPA, and tested their effect on retention, based on the responses collected from 241 CS student. Year of studies and Effort have positive effects on students' intention to finish their studies in CS. Interestingly, the expected GPA has a negative effect on students' intentions to finish their studies. The findings contribute to theory and practice, as they offer CS educators and policy makers insights that may aid towards increased student retention and reduced dropout rates.

Creative activities for children have drawn great interest in the last years. The advent of programming languages for children (i.e., Scratch) combined with accessible programmable hardware platforms (i.e., Arduino) makes it possible for children to engage in creative development of digital artifact, like robots and interactive installations. However, there are limited studies towards the design and improvement of these activities. The goal of this study is to provide validated knowledge about the trade-off between collaboration and control throughout creative programming activities. To this end, a group of researchers and artists designed and implemented two workshop programs of a total of 51 pupils, exploring their experiences with open source software. The workshops were based on Reggio Emilia philosophy of creative reuse and the open-source software Scratch. Qualitative and quantitative approaches of the research are based on data collected through interviews, surveys and observations. The results of this paper argue that: (a) collaboration among children improves the value of the workshops, (b) however big groups lead children to lose the control over their actions during the workshop, and (c) children's control significantly affects workshop's usefulness.

Healthcare games are becoming increasingly popular because of their potential to improve patients' wellbeing before, during, and after medical treatment. Even though young children (here referred to as toddlers) make up a growing group of gamers, there is a lack of research focusing on healthcare games for this group. Since toddlers often express unmotivated behavior towards receiving medical treatment, the potential of healthcare gaming applications for this group should be explored. The purpose of our study is to provide a set of research-derived design considerations for healthcare games and applications for toddlers. Our approach included an initial best practices collection through a workshop involving experts from pediatric healthcare and pedagogy, and an affinity diagramming categorization by a focus group with HCI and health researchers. This resulted in a robust set of best practices that was further used for establishing a connection with game components and transformation into design considerations. As an illustrating example we present a prototype of a healthcare game developed to improve nebulizer treatment for toddlers. The final result of this work is a set of key aspects to consider when designing healthcare games and applications for toddlers. The results should be useful for designers and researchers who work in the intersection between health and young user groups.

The advent of programming languages for children (i.e., Scratch) combined with accessible programmable hardware platforms (i.e., Arduino) makes it possible for teenagers to engage in creative development of digital enriched artifacts, like robots and interactive installations. But what are the important factors that characterize these development activities? And more specifically, what motivates children to participate in such software and hardware intensive activities? In this paper we present the results of an empirical investigation regarding the key aspects of a creative learning context. The goal is to understand what motivates children to participate in these development activities. In our empirical evaluation, a group of researchers and artists designed, implemented, and evaluated three workshop programs of 66 children total, with the final goal of exploring children's attitudes software and hardware-intensive activities. The workshops were based on the Reggio Emilia education principles, open source software Scratch and Arduino and were conducted in centers that use recycled materials for creative purposes. For the first phase of the evaluation, qualitative data was collected from 11 interviews and was analyzed using content analysis. For the second phase, we designed a survey grounded in motivational factors for technology. 37 survey responses were collected. For both evaluation phases, photos and observations were recorded and used to triangulate our data. The results showed that: (a) software and hardware intensive activities raise awareness of technology, intensify the experience, and invite students to explore boundaries and increase collaboration and the exchange of views and ideas, and (b) the activity's easiness and usefulness significantly affect children's intention to participate. These results have implications for those programming languages and hardware platforms for children, as well as for those setting up creative learning frameworks around such technology.

Educational video games have been employed by teachers in order to make educational software more attractive to students. However, limited research has been made on the design and assessment of the storytelling elements and the educational effectiveness of these games in sciences curricula. For this purpose, we used Scratch to develop a storytelling mathematics video game and then we measured its educational effect to a small group of twelve students. We found that the story-based math video game has captivated the interest of students and it has been beneficial in the improvement of their performance in an assessment test. Most notably, the improvement was higher for students who used to have poor performance in mathematics. In practice, educators should develop similar games for similar science topics (e.g., physics, chemistry, etc), while further research should consider the active involvement of students in the design of serious games.

This paper reports experiences from an experiment in a software architecture course where the focus was both on giving students valuable education as well as getting important empirical results. The paper describes how the experiment was integrated in the course, and presents an evaluation of the experiment from an educational point of view. Further, the paper reflects on the costs and the benefits of carrying out an experiment in the context of a software architecture course for the involved stakeholders namely the researchers, the students, and the instructors. We also describe some guidelines for planning and executing experiments as a part of a software engineering course.

Do software engineering students need interdisciplinary skills? Do students learn different things from an interdisciplinary project work than from software development projects? How can a specific interdisciplinary project course be organized? This paper provides reflections about these questions, based on the experience gained through running a project-based interdisciplinary course thrice. This course is part of the master degree education at the NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. Students taking the course work in teams of five, often coming from study programs of quite different disciplines. There is no predefined project assignment, instead the teacher has only described an open-ended theme, within which different student teams then define their own project assignment. The paper provides some reflections and lessons learned that can be exploited for designing similar interdisciplinary team project courses in other universities.

A way to learn about Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) products is to define a set of characteristics or attributes and then to collect information about these attributes. In an industrial context, the attributes used to select COTS clearly depend on project specific goals. In our educational context we made an attempt to define general COTS characterization attributes. The resulting framework provides a structure, which facilitate the learning process. Our proposed attributes have several similarities with the generic evaluation attributes defined by ISO 9126. A comparison with such a standard provides a deeper insight into the problem of characterizing COTS products.

Software processes are complex entities that demand careful understand ing and improvement as they determine the quality of the resulting product. A necessary step toward the improvement of an organization's process is a clear description of the entities involved and of their mutual relationships. Process modelelicitationaims at constructing this description under the shape of a software process model. The model is constructed by gathering, from several sources, process information which is often incomplete, inconsistent, and ambiguous. A process modeling language can be used to represent the model being elicited. However, elicitation requires process models to be understandable and well structured. These requirements are often not satisfied by available process modeling languages becuase of their bias toward process enaction rather than process description. This article presents a process modeling language and a support tool which are conceived especially for process model elicitation. TheE3language is an object-oriented modeling language with a graphical notation. InE3, associations are a means to express constraints and facilitate reuse. TheE3p-draw tool supports the creation and management ofE3models and provides a view mechanism that enables inspection of models according to different perspectives.

This work concerns the software process of a software engineering course project work. The quality manual contains a general process model, written in a formal software process modeling language that describes activities, tools, products, responsibilities, and measures. The quality manual serves as a basis for obtaining project specific plans, and for communicating the process to students, colleagues, and customers. The formal process model is the basis for analyzing and improving the process over the years, thus improving the quality of the provided education. The analysis of a given project run has revealed some problems and errors in the original model. This list of problems has been used as an action list to design a new process model. The new model will be exploited for the next years project runs.

The authors categorize some aspects of software process evolution and customization, and describe how they are handled in the EPOS PM system. Comparisons are made to other PM systems. A process model in EPOS consists of a schema of classes and meta-classes, and its model entities and relationships. There is an underlying software engineering database, EPOSDB, offering uniform versioning of all model parts and a context of nested cooperating transactions. Then, there is a reflective object-oriented process specification language, on top of the EPOSDB. Policies for model creation, composition, change, instantiation, refinement, and enaction are explicitly represented and are used by a set of PM automatic tools. The main tools are a planner to instantiate tasks, an execution manager to enact such tasks, and a PM manager to define, analyze, customize, and evolve the process schema.>

Software process models are meant to describe software engineering activities around evolving software products. Process models need modifications due to gained experience, changed policies or project-specific requirements, and a set of versions of the original models must be maintained. Thus, software process models are evolving products and should be under the control of a configuration management (CM) system. EPOS models software processes in an object-oriented data model. Both process models and running instances are stored in a versioned database. EPOS software process models may be evolved and reused by the same CM techniques as used for software systems.>