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.

Generative AI (GenAI) presents societal and ethical challenges related to equity, academic integrity, bias, and data provenance. This working group will consider the ethical and societal impacts of GenAI in higher computing education. In this paper, we outline the goals, methodology and expected deliverables of the working group. In particular, we will carry out a systematic literature review to address a wide set of issues and topics covering the rapidly emerging technology of GenAI from the perspective of its ethical and social impacts, we will provide an evaluation of university policies on the adoption and guidelines for use of GenAI for computing education and develop a framework to outline the ethical and societal impacts of GenAI in computing education. This work synthesizes existing research and considers the implications for educational and professional codes of ethics.

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.

The development of non-technical skills, such as critical thinking and public speaking, is increasingly recognized in computing curricula as essential for computing professionals in the job market. Universities are adopting active learning methods to cultivate these skills, among which are debate-based teaching methods. Previous literature showed that debating is used in many knowledge domains, and can help develop skills of information synthesis, critical thinking, and effective verbal communication. In spite of these benefits, however, debating in computing education is still rare. This work explores a partial redesign of a debates-based teaching method, called Tech Battles, implemented in a 6-ECTS non-technical course at the University of Trento targeted to first-year Master's students in Computer Science with a minor in innovation and entrepreneurship. Battles have been part of the course since 2013, and over the years the teaching team upgraded the methodology, which now foresees a preparatory activity where students read a science fiction short story assigned by the teachers. In this paper, we discuss how this latest modification changes the course and its impacts: how the workflow of each debate evolved, our criteria for selecting short stories, preliminary observations gathered from the field, and the research methods that will be used to more thoroughly validate the updated method.

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.

In the last decades, teaching methods in computing are shifting towards active learning. Among these, a notable case are debate-based classes which can be used to develop skills such as critical thinking which, are in high demand in the workplace. The choice of debate topic is a particularly controversial theme, since it can influence the students' motivation, experience, and understanding of the course's content. In this poster, we propose an evolution of a debate-based teaching methodology, called Tech Battles, to include the reading of science fiction short stories as a preparatory activity. The intervention takes place in an Innovation and Entrepreneurship course for computing students at the University of Trento, where science fiction can help students develop critical thinking about technology and innovation, but also aid them in understanding the debate's context, and ultimately enhance their learning. We conclude our reflections by exploring possible implications of this change, connecting it to existing traditions that leverage science fiction as a pedagogical tool.

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.

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.