The last decade has seen a rising awareness on computing's social and ethical impacts. If the ambition is for computing disciplines to reposition themselves to be able to educate about these impacts, however, we have to wonder whether we are duly training all the change-makers: not only the students, but also their teachers. While recent computing curricula such as the ACM/IEEE CC2020 and CS2023 have evolved to include Social, Ethical, and Professional (SEP) competencies, the shift has exposed a gap: students are expected to develop these competencies during their degrees, but these learning goals are supposed to be filled by faculty with limited preparation and support. In this paper we argue that, as a community, we are underexploring systematic discussions, research, and practices about the development of faculty SEP competencies. In the status quo, faculty teach SEP through a hidden curriculum: our curricula take socio-ethical stances, but they do so tacitly, implicitly, or with limited awareness. We call for direct action in building SEP competencies by proposing systemic, local, and individual actions such as creating incentives, establishing communities of practice, and promoting reflective practice. Our hope is that, by developing new practices, we can build sufficient critical mass in our community to reorient computing towards the social. Our wish for this paper is that it may serve as a call to action for the computer science education community to invest in its educators as the architects of hope for a socially responsible computing profession.

Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) is an active learning methodology that engages students in solving authentic, real-world problems while fostering collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking, and it has become particularly popular in computer science education. The adaptation of CBL designs across different educational contexts, however, remains challenging, not defined in the literature, and underexplored in practice. This work builds on a previous CBL framework called ''Choose Your Own Adventure in CBL (CYOA-CBL)'', designed to enhance flexibility and adaptability across educational contexts. The aim of this work was to investigate whether a CBL approach, originally designed for a full semester course, could be effectively adapted into a four-week extracurricular activity while maintaining its pedagogical integrity. The activity combined one in-person week with three online weeks and involved 20 master's students working in small teams. Overall, this study provides support for CBL's successful implementation in short extracurricular contexts and highlights practical strategies for educators seeking to integrate CBL into short-format or micro-credentialled courses, contributing to the ongoing discussion on skills development through active learning approaches in computing education.

When students take introductory programming courses in university, they often need to setup a development environment. Development environments enable code execution while also providing a uniform setting for students to compare results and facilitate troubleshooting. At the same time, though, development enviroments often require installing applications or signing up to web services.

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

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

Setting up development environments may be a complex hurdle for students who approach coding for the first time, and standardising environments among students may be an even greater challenge for teachers. Researchers and teachers tried to mitigate this issue with several solutions, all with different trade-offs, which may exclude students with limited internet access, low-powered devices, or lower computer proficiency.

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

Digitalisation is bringing computing professionals to higher and higher position of responsibility. Universities, however, have not fully answered to the increased demand in skills that these professionals need to have. In this panel, we present the work of a Teachers’ Community of Practice that is trying to fill this gap by teaching Innovation and Entrepreneurship to computer science students from 17 European universities belonging to a consortium called EIT Digital. The panel will replicate the Community of Practice approach, creating a space to share experiences, encouraging participants to start their own Teachers’ Community of Practices, and transparently discussing points of success and failure alike.

Substantial HCI research investigated the relationship between webpage complexity and aesthetics, but without a definitive conclusion. Some research showed an inverse linear correlation, some other showed an inverted u-shaped curve, while the rest showed no relationship at all. Such a lack of clarity complicates hypothesis formulation and result interpretation for future research, and lowers the reliability and generalizability of potential advice for Web design practice. We re-collected complexity and aesthetics ratings for five datasets previously used in webpage aesthetics and complexity research. The results were mixed, but suggested an inverse linear relationship with a weaker u-shaped sub-component. A subsequent visual inspection of revealed several confounding factors that may have led to the mixed results, including some webpages looking broken or archaic. The second data collection showed that accounting for these factors generally eliminates the u-shaped tendency of the complexity-aesthetics relationship, at least, for a relatively homogeneous sample of English-speaking participants.

The last decade has seen a rising popularity of active learning methodologies in Computer Science, empowering students and developing their soft skills as well as their technical knowledge. In parallel, the speed of technological obsolescence also increased, creating challenges for teachers to keep their course content fresh and up to date. In this paper, we present a constructivist redesign of a Graduate-level laboratory course in Web Service Design and Engineering that leverages latent pockets of student knowledge to tackle these challenges through Learning by Teaching. We illustrate how such redesign was planned, deployed and evaluated, highlighting the guiding role of teachers in the process and discussing how this approach was able to solve the problem of keeping content updated while broadening both content and tools students were exposed to. Furthermore, we will discuss how the additional motivation stemming from their empowerment allowed students not only to perform more work compared to a lecture-based implementation, but also to perceive it in the end as a lesser load.

In this paper we provide the first results obtained from an ongoing project on collaborations between Universities on blended learning courses in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Using a design based research approach, all Universities participating in the pilot co-designed settings on how they will collaborate on a course, relying entirely on online tools and online materials. In total there were seven such cross-University collaboration settings, all of them using different key features, ranging from webinars (virtual classes), collaboration on a specific project, peer-review assignments, exchange of personnel, to an exchange of pedagogical methods. In this paper we report on the outcomes from a workshop in which the impressions from teachers and the students were presented for each collaboration. We analyze what worked well, and what did not, as well as recount he perceived value of the approaches taken by the collaborating Universities.

Task execution timeliness, i.e., the completion of a task within a given time frame, is a known open issue in crowdsourcing. While running tasks on crowdsourcing platforms a requester experiences long tails in execution caused by abandoned assignments (those left by workers unfinished), which become available for other workers only after some expiration time (e.g., 30 minutes in CrowdFlower). These abandoned assignments result in significant delays and a poor predictability of the overall task execution time. In this paper, we propose an approach and an implementation called ReLauncher to identify such abandoned assignments and relaunch them for other workers. We evaluate our implementation with an experiment on CrowdFlower that provides substantive evidence for a significant execution speed improvement with an average extra cost of about 10%.

There are two key issues which are critical for a person crowdsourcing work: quality control and timeliness. While the first topic is extensively covered in the literature, the timeliness is still not very well analyzed. In our past experiments on CrowdFlower we noticed that 90% of task instances were completed in only 10 minutes, the rest 10% could take hours to be completed. There were also extra peaks in performance on the 30th and 60th minutes since the task publication. From the observation of these patterns we wanted to understand better how the crowd workers execute tasks, to try to describe this behavior mathematically and to identify ways to speed up the tasks execution.

Crowdsourcing platforms are changing the way people can work and earn money. The population of workers on crowdsourcing platforms already counts millions and keeps growing. Workers on these platforms face several usability challenges, which we identify in this work by running two surveys on the CrowdFlower platform. Our surveys show that the majority of workers spend more than 25% of their time on searching tasks to work on. Limitations in the current user interface of the task listing page prevent workers from focusing more on the execution. In this work we present an attempt to design and implement a specific user interface for task listing aimed to help workers spend less time searching for tasks and thus navigate among them more easily.

Based on an effective clustering algorithm-Affinity Propagation (AP)-we present in this paper a novel semisupervised text clustering algorithm, called Seeds Affinity Propagation (SAP). There are two main contributions in our approach: 1) a new similarity metric that captures the structural information of texts, and 2) a novel seed construction method to improve the semisupervised clustering process. To study the performance of the new algorithm, we applied it to the benchmark data set Reuters-21578 and compared it to two state-of-the-art clustering algorithms, namely, k-means algorithm and the original AP algorithm. Furthermore, we have analyzed the individual impact of the two proposed contributions. Results show that the proposed similarity metric is more effective in text clustering (F-measures ca. 21 percent higher than in the AP algorithm) and the proposed semisupervised strategy achieves both better clustering results and faster convergence (using only 76 percent iterations of the original AP). The complete SAP algorithm obtains higher F-measure (ca. 40 percent improvement over k-means and AP) and lower entropy (ca. 28 percent decrease over k-means and AP), improves significantly clustering execution time (20 times faster) in respect that k-means, and provides enhanced robustness compared with all other methods.

This paper presents a model and a tool that allows Web users to define, execute, and manage lifecycles for any artifact available on the Web. In the paper we show the need for lifecycle management of Web artifacts, and we show in particular why it is important that non-programmers are also able to do this. We then discuss why current models do not allow this, and we present a model and a system implementation that achieves lifecycle management for any URI-identifiable and accessible object. The most challenging parts of the work lie in the definition of a simple but universal model and system (and in particular in allowing universality and simplicity to coexist) and in the ability to hide from the lifecycle modeler the complexity intrinsic in having to access and manage a variety of resources, which differ in nature, in the operations that are allowed on them, and in the protocols and data formats required to access them.