Fluency is a term commonly used to express proficiency within a specific area, often languages. However, it is sometimes also used in programming. In this poster, we present a phenomenographic study to investigate how CS students understand the term.

As engineering education is a professional education, it should prepare students for working life. However, there are obvious limitations to the amount of content that is possible to cover and the authenticity of the learning environments. In this study, we investigate the students' awareness and perception of these limitations by answering the following two research questions: What competencies do the students view as work-life relevant? How do students reflect on their opportunities to learn these competencies? The context of the study is the five-year Master of Science in Engineering and Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Throughout the programme, the students attend a programme-integrated course with four reflection seminars including written assignments each year. In their fourth year they wrote reflections on their perceived work-life readiness and 38 of these reflections were analysed thematically in this study. We find that students expressed an elaborate view of what constitutes work-life relevant competencies. They readily identify learning experiences in the programme where they have developed such competencies, for instance through projects. They also show an understanding that there are limitations in the ability of the university environment to achieve fully authentic learning experiences. Many students see it as their own responsibility and necessity to complement their education with other opportunities for work-life relevant learning, such as hobby projects or internships. Others seem relaxed about any gap they may have in their work-life preparation and expect to learn on their first job.

This study focuses on the progression between courses in a programme, meaning that thelearning experiences build upon and reinforce the previous ones. The idea of mutuallysupporting courses is a cornerstone of the integrated curriculum, and hence of the CDIOapproach. However, despite much use of the term, there is a lack of work to conceptualiseprogression. The aim of this paper is, accordingly, to provide a richer theoreticalconceptualisation of progression and to apply this in analysing the implementation in aprogramme. In this case, we focus specifically on the progression through a series of coursesbased on authentic engineering projects. Such courses, called Design-implementExperiences, are a prominent feature of the CDIO framework; Standard 5 recommends at leasttwo project courses with progression through the curriculum. The context for the study is the5-year Electrical Engineering programme at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. It contains aseries of yearly project courses starting in the first year and ending with the master thesisproject. The purpose is to support students to synthesise and consolidate their learning inprevious and parallel subject courses, and to develop professional engineering skills. Here,the progression between the three first project courses is described with detailed elaborationof three themes: communication, project planning and management, and ethics. The questionsguiding our investigation are: What is the nature of progression across these project courses?In particular, along what dimensions is progression planned, and how is that implemented inthe course design?

When trying to understand student success in computer science, much of the attention has been focused on CS1, leaving follow-up courses such as CS2 less researched. Prior studies of CS2 have often taken a deductive approach by focusing on predetermined variables such as CS1 grades, the impact of different paths from CS1 to CS2, gender and race. Although this has resulted in a better insight into these variables, we wonder if there might be another way of viewing which variables affect the students' success in the course. We have therefore chosen an inductive approach to better understand what these variables might be and how they interplay. This was done by analysing 16 semi-structured interviews with students enrolled in CS2 who have another speciality than computer science. The interviews focused mainly on the students' methods for succeeding in the course, experiences of the course and programming background. Through a thematic analysis of the interviews, we found the following five main success variables for CS2: programming competence, computer literacy, opportunity to receive help, ability to help oneself and teaching. These variables can in several cases be related to the ones previously addressed, however, they can also offer a different perspective on student success in the course.When trying to understand student success in computer science, much of the attention has been focused on CS1, leaving follow-up courses such as CS2 less researched. Prior studies of CS2 have often taken a deductive approach by focusing on predetermined variables such as CS1 grades, the impact of different paths from CS1 to CS2, gender and race. Although this has resulted in a better insight into these variables, we wonder if there might be another way of viewing which variables affect the students' success in the course. We have therefore chosen an inductive approach to better understand what these variables might be and how they interplay. This was done by analysing 16 semi-structured interviews with students enrolled in CS2 who have another speciality than computer science. The interviews focused mainly on the students' methods for succeeding in the course, experiences of the course and programming background. Through a thematic analysis of the interviews, we found the following five main success variables for CS2: programming competence, computer literacy, opportunity to receive help, ability to help oneself and teaching. These variables can in several cases be related to the ones previously addressed, however, they can also offer a different perspective on student success in the course.

A CS degree is traditionally composed of many different courses which often build on each other. This means students need prerequisites from previous courses to succeed in follow-up courses. In this study, I will follow a group of students through their CS degree to better understand which prerequisites are necessary at different junctures of their education and how the students are affected when prerequisites are missing.

In this full research paper we examine questionable collaboration from a student perspective. Collaborating while solving computer lab assignments is often considered an important part when learning computer science, as it allows students to discuss their work, while also practicing working together. However, it also introduces risks, such as students collaborating in ways negatively impacting their learning outcomes and leading to inaccurate grading. Hence it is important to work towards reducing the use of these poor collaborative practices. In order to ameliorate the problem with academic misconduct, we need to understand students' justifications for deviating from acceptable practices. In this paper we therefore investigate how students justify their collaborative practices during computer lab assignments in situations they experience as questionable. The justifications were collected through 15 semi-structured interviews with students experienced in pair programming, majoring in computer science and other technical fields from two large well-known European universities.The justifications from the interviews were analysed using phenomenography resulting in seven categories: external pressure, lack of interest, spending time on the assignment, understanding the end product, contributing to the process, learning from the assignment and reflecting on the purpose of the learning. These describe in which situations students might deviate from the rules and can be used by institutions to prevent such behavior.

Studying students' prerequisites from one course to another is important to understand which areas can be improved to ensure a smoother progression. This poster presents a pilot to a longitudinal study investigating students' progression from CS1 to CS2 using a mixed methods approach.

Bedömning av transversella färdigheter i STEM (ATSSTEM) är ett innovativt utveckling- och forskningsprojekt med en experimentell design, som syftar till att förbättra digitala bedömningsformer av elevers kunskaper och ämnesövergripande färdigheter inom STEM [matematik, naturvetenskap och teknik]. Detta Erasmus+ projekt bedrivs i grundskolor och gymnasieskolor runt om i Europa och pågår mellan 2019–2022. Haninge kommun och Institutionen för lärande vid Kungliga Tekniska högskolan deltar i ATSSTEM-partnernätverket tillsammans med 11 andra utbildningsinstitutioner som befinner sig på olika nivåer av utbildningssystemet i åtta europeiska länder. Ämnesövergripande undervisningsupplägg med fokus på Agenda 2030 utvecklas och prövas tillsammans med lärare från skolor runt om i Europa. Från Sverige deltar sju grundskolor i Haninge kommun. 

Frågeställningar 

- Hur kommunicerar vi informerat samtycke i en flerspråkig miljö? 

- Hur kan vi kommunicera med vårdnadshavare på andra språk än svenska om potentiella fördelarna och risker med praktiknära skolforskning för deras barn? 

- Hur kan vi engagera vårdnadshavare med olika språkbakgrund för att få dem att känna sig del av forskningen och förklara vårdnadshavarnas och elevernas rättigheter och de garantier de kan förvänta sig? 

- Vilka logistik- och kostnadskrav ställer detta på forskargrupper? 

- Hur resurssätter vi lärare och forskare att kommunicera med vårdnadshavare i flerspråkiga miljöer med avseende på informerat samtycke? 

Resultat och diskussion 

I syfte att säkerställa att vårdnadshavare och elever på pilotskolorna kunde tillgodogöra sig innehållet i samtyckesformuläret beslutade projektgruppen att översätta dokumentet till några av de mest förekommande språken i Haninge engelska, arabiska, polska, ryska och turkiska. 

Vi vill till detta seminarium bjuda in publiken till en dialog där vi diskuterar och delar erfarenheter i den etiskt utmanande frågan om hur man kommunicerar informerat samtycke i en flerspråkig skolmiljö. 

Assessment of Transversal Skills in STEM (ATSSTEM) is an innovative policy experimentation project, which aims to enhance digital assessment of students’ transversal skills in STEM. This Erasmus+ project is situated in primary and secondary schools in and run between 2019– 2022. The Department of Education in Haninge municipality and the Department of Learning at KTH Royal Institute of Technology partake in the ATSSTEM partner network together with 11 other educational institutions, operating on different levels of the educational system across 8 European countries. Integrated STEM learning activities focusing Agenda 2030 is developed and piloted together with teachers in 7 primary and secondary schools in Haninge municipality in Sweden. Following regular ethical requirements for educational research projects; the research team seeks informed consent from the students’ guardians as the students involved are underaged. The pilot schools in municipality of Haninge are fortunate to have students from all over the world, and a number of families have recently immigrated to Sweden. STEM education has a strong policy focus at European and national levels on widening opportunities for under-represented groups. With the purpose to emphasis informed, we therefore decided to translate the informed consent form to a number of languages [e.g. Arabic, Spanish and Polish] spoken at home in our pilot schools. We would like to invite audience to discuss and share experience in the ethically challenging matter of communicating informed consent in a multilingual school environment with the following suggested prompts.How can we communicate with parents in other languages (and with different cultural expectations) about the potential benefits of research to their children?How can we engage parents from different backgrounds to make them feel part of research and explain the rights of parents and students and the safeguards they can expect?What logistic and costs requirements does this place on research teams? How do we resource teachers and researchers to communicate with parents in multi-lingual environments?