This paper reports on the second iteration of the Taxonomies workshop series, in which botanical art is leveraged to foster learning in science, targeted high school students with an orientation towards fine arts. The original aim of Taxonomies was to enrich the common understanding of the STEAM framework, in which art is seen mainly as a motivational resource in STEM learning, with the result of underexploiting the power of art making as epistemology. The deep interconnection among art making, lab experiments and acquisition of scientific knowledge, is what we identify as “the spirit of the Renaissance”, and we designed a series of three workshops based on this spirit. We run the series twice, with students from a Danish Gymnasium, involving their art and their science teachers, and a local fabrication laboratory. Qualitative, ethnographic methods were used to collect and analyze data from the workshops; the findings support our idea that it is possible to reframe STEM education, and create a framework in which art and science are intertwined areas for epistemic and empirical practices, cultivating scientific knowledge and art skills as integrated aspects of knowing.

Multimedia has been recognised as a powerful domain for contextualising programming concepts. However, the inherent complexity of multimedia applications, particularly their reliance on advanced data structures, often poses significant challenges for novice programmers. To address this issue, we implemented Medialib, a user-friendly Python multimedia library specifically designed for beginners at or above the high school level. Medialib was developed through an iterative process informed by empirical studies involving non-technical university students and their instructors, with the goal of making multimedia programming more accessible to learners without prior technical backgrounds. This paper introduces, for the first time, a simplified multimedia Python library and accompanying pedagogical materials tailored to the cognitive and instructional needs of novice programmers. Medialib enables a pedagogical shift in introductory Python courses from traditional mathematics-oriented exercises to multimedia-focused tasks. To evaluate its effectiveness and transferability, two empirical studies were conducted: a 14-week study in Japan (21 instructional hours, 36 students) and a 2-week study in the UK (12 instructional hours, 84 students). Analyses are done on the study data which includes teacher observational notes, questionnaires, and interviews. Specifically, a comparison of the weekly performance of learners in traditional maths-related exercises and Medialib-related exercises in the first study is discussed. Findings from both studies indicate that learners responded positively to the Medialib materials. Notably, in the Japanese study, students who initially struggled with maths-related programming tasks were able to successfully acquire foundational programming skills through Medialib activities. From week 7 onward, students consistently demonstrated strong performance in both types of exercises, suggesting that Medialib serves not only as an effective entry point for programming education but also as a transferable learning scaffold across contexts.

This article foregrounds the material element of literacy and contributes new perspectives on the roles of technologies in literacy events. Discarding deterministic ideas of linearity between the introduction of technologies and effects, a sociomaterial perspective is adopted to foreground materiality and human-technology relationships. The article investigates how higher education students engage with paper-based, analog technologies, and how students’ relationships with technologies can be understood when viewed from a sociomaterial and postdigital perspective. Three vignettes, each presenting a literacy event, illustrate how students from computer science, engineering, and philosophy respectively engage with paper-based materials and tools. Our analysis, using the postdigital notion of positionalities, shows that students’ relationships with technologies are shaped by their disciplinary and social positionalities, leading to different degrees of cognitive, affective, bodily, and behavioural engagement in and sometimes to disengagement from literacy events. Our conclusion is that the introduction of paper-based materials and tools offers opportunities for reflecting on the role of technologies in literacy practices and that materiality should not be taken for granted when designing for disciplinary academic literacy. Technologies entangle with students’ disciplinary and social positionalities, impacting forms of engagement and forming more-than-human literacy events. These findings point to a need for explicitly considering and discussing positionalities and the co-shaping role of technologies in designs for literacy. For this purpose, we offer a set of reflection questions that teachers can use to support students in identifying their disciplinary, social, and more-than-human positionalities to become aware of how these entangle with technologies in literacy practices.

This paper presents Taxonomies, a STEAM project placed on the intersection between art, science, and technology. In Taxonomies art is taking the lead role, providing a goal for action, while natural sciences and computation provide knowledge and means for artistic creation. The project is a collaboration between the University of Southern Denmark, the BiotechLab at Spinderihallerne and Rosborg Gymnasium, a Danish secondary school oriented towards the humanities. During the past year a series of 3 workshops was designed, implemented, and run at Rosborg, respectively focusing on: fabricating organic colors from plants, botanical painting with organic colors, and procedurally generating plant forms. Through our process, we found new insights on how to integrate art and science within STEAM, with art playing a sense-making role. Three forms of engagement were observed during the workshops: personal, sensorial, and exploratory. The students expressed appreciation of the theoretical modules at the beginning of the workshops, and voiced curiosity for more in-depth knowledge about natural inks. A new iteration of the workshops is being run at Rosborg with the involvement of sciences teachers, which will provide richer insights on the relations between the different disciplines and students' engagement.

This paper reports on the Erasmus+ Spadatas project, focused on supporting schools in their integration of European GDPR data protection in their practices. We see schools as ecologies, characterized by groups of actors interacting within a locality, defined by physical spaces, shared culture and tools. Teachers emerged as the main actors, experiencing the problems created by the digitization of the school, such as the way that digital platforms and social media were compromising the privacy and safety of the school ecology. Building on these insights, we have reconfigured our original aim, conducting a participatory, citizen science inquiry with teachers as central actors, and their students, mediating across other actors and ecologies beyond their immediate sphere of influence. It was decided to provide a digital suite composed of two tools: the first tool is a series of selfevaluation questionnaires, enabling teachers and colleagues to be aware of their level of proficiency in adopting competences, practices, and tools to effectively protect the pupils from data breaches. The second tool is a digital game-simulation, called Viral Sphere, addressing teachers' and their students' desires for resources to foster a dialogue on GDPR. This paper presents insights from summative evaluations of the Spadatas digital suite with partners and schools in Denmark and Italy, focusing on three emerging, intersecting dimensions: ecological boundaries, technology and practice, and dialogue and identity.

Beginner programmers can develop an intuitive understanding of programming by leveraging the motivating field of multimedia to visually inspect outputs and experiment with different ways to solve problems. This paper presents MediaLib, a Python library designed to facilitate multimedia programming and lessen the cognitive load associated with programming for novice programmers. In addition, we designed an official MediaLib website which contains the library itself, two tutorials, and clear documentation. The tutorial clearly presents the learning objectives of each lesson and contains exercises related to MediaLib. We designed these exercises to help students gain knowledge incrementally, without requiring in-depth maths knowledge.

In this study we combine a participatory design process with a citizen science framing, to foster a dialogue on GDPR in the school. We focus on the perspective of students, approaching them as co-researchers, in designing and evaluating a series of apps, aimed at spreading knowledge on GDPR. We have created a design space between secondary school students in Denmark and Italy, to gather insights across different countries. Results show that approaching students as designers and testers enabled them to provide honest and concrete insights on their experience with GDPR. We identified a detachment related to their posting activities, caused by how social media platforms (SoMe) challenge the boundaries between their personal and school-related ecologies.

SPADATAS is an Erasmus + that aims to raise awareness on data fragility and enhance data protection of students in academic data management. One of the objectives of the project is to develop tools or instruments for auto-assessment of data protection knowledge and skills. In this manuscript we present different questionnaires designed to assess data fragility and enhance data privacy among educational roles such as teachers, principals, IT admins, and data privacy officers. The tool, developed based on the principles of DigCompEdu, aims to raise awareness about data protection processes, responsible use of digital competence, and the need for acquiring digital skills. By evaluating participants’ perceptions, the tool help to stakeholders address objectives such as analyzing data literacy proficiency, mapping data academic management processes, identifying flaws and gaps in data treatment, and detecting needs for digital skills and competencies. Schools can utilize this tool to assess their digital skills, enhance data literacy, and reinforce privacy and security measures for students’ data, ultimately fostering policy updates for data treatment.

In this paper, we are interested in investigating how the introduction of GDPR has affected the teachers, with respect to how the new rules have altered their practices, which issues or challenges they have experienced, and which strategies they have developed to overcome such issues. Proceeding from an ecological perspective, we look at schools as complex ecologies, in which every change, happening at various scales and involvement levels, affects each actor in specific ways and at different degrees, altering their practices and mutual relations. Activity theory is also used, as a critical lens to look at teachers’ practices that have been disrupted by the increasing digitalization of schools. In our data collection, we adopted a user-centered design methodology, supported by ethnomethodology and co-design workshops in situ and online. According to our data teachers are experiencing pressure with respect to three main aspects: educating themselves and their students about GDPR and use of Social Media (SoMe) platforms, which are designed to facilitate data sharing on a global scale; how to handle students’ data avoiding leaks or potential conflicts, and finally the expansion of the boundaries of the school ecology. This last aspect appears of critical relevance, as the increasing digitalization of education and the spread use of SoMe platforms, has compromised the locality of the school as an ecology, leading to increasing uncertainty and lack of overview on the actions undertaken by its actors.

The introduction of cloud technology in educational settings over the past ten years has enabled organizations to embrace a data-driven decision-making paradigm. Schools and colleges are undergoing rapid digital updating procedures due to the use of outside technological solutions in the cloud, affecting how students learn and are taught. Regarding data, teaching and learning processes are improved by technology that gathers and analyzes student data to present useful information. With this technological shift comes the pervasiveness of data thanks to cloud storage. This means that in many instances, outside the purview of schools and universities, certain actors may gather, manage, and treat educational data on private servers and data centers. This privatization allows data leaks, record manipulation, and unwanted access. To help primary and secondary schools understand what data-driven decision-making entails for an educational institution and what problems with data fragility are related to current educational technology and data academic management, the current paper outlines the main goals of the SPADATAS project, its organizational structure, and its key issues. It also offers tools and frameworks to safeguard the privacy, security, and confidentiality of students' data.

Our study discusses results from testing and co-designing Sandwich Robot, a game on algorithmic thinking targeting beginner programmers. The player composes code from a minimal set of blocks, to make a robotic character gather ingredients for a sandwich, following a specific order; the gameplay is similar to other Computational Thinking (CT) games like Karel the Robot or LightBot. The latest prototype of the game has been tested with three classes of 15-20 pupils from a technical high school in Denmark. The test was conducted in collaboration with their teacher in the subject Informatik, which focuses on CT and basic programming, and ended with a co-design workshop. Our results shows that pupils were interest in the basic concept behind our game, they generally described our game as “fun”. Pupils and their teacher saw learning potential in the game, as a tool for understanding algorithmic thinking, but also for refining their learning at later stages. This expanded the role we envisioned for our game, leading us to rethink its relation to the pupils’ learning process. On-going and future work involves addressing pupils’ feedback and providing a level editor to allow Kahoot-style challenges. Our main contribution provides an exemplar of how the thinking behind algorithmic problem-solving can be transposed into game mechanics, embodied in a casual game, and how a non-technical narrative can support beginners learning CT.

This paper investigates how to provide meaningful scaffolding to bachelor humanities students, to enabled them to acquire Computational Thinking (CT) technical skills, and in particular basic programming competences. Two of the authors have been involved in the re-design, implementation and execution of a basic programming and CT course, offered to first-semester students as part of the Information science, IT and interaction design bachelor program, at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). The central problem we faced in restructuring our introductory course, was finding a game genre that could support creative coding for beginners, be motivational and recognizable by the students, and would work with our use-modify-create learning approach. Our findings suggest that point-and-click games are an effective way to provide scaffolding and ease non-technical students into P5 programming. The genre has good expressive power, and the students were motivated because they recognized and could relate to the games they worked on. Future work will address students’ problems with scaling up the point-and-click games.

This paper investigates the simplification of programming for non-technical university students. Typical simplification strategies are outlined, and according to our findings CT courses for non-technical students typically address learners from different faculties, providing generic and basic knowledge, not specifically related to their major. In this study, we propose instead a hermeneutic approach to simplify programming, in which we aim at clarifying the problem-solving aspect of programming, addressing computational problems that are specific to their studies and leveraging on learners' preunderstanding of the digital media they have experienced as users. The practical counterpart of our theoretical approach is a minimalistic Python multimedia library, called Medialib, that we designed to enable university students with a non-technical profile to create visual media and games with short and readable code. We discuss the use of Medialib in two empirical case studies: a collaboration with the university of Kyushu in Fukuoka, Japan, and a coding module for Media Studies students at the University of Southern Denmark. Furthermore, we use Notional Machines to attempt a comparison of the simplicity of learning tools for programming, and to ground our claim that Medialib is "simpler" for learners than other popular approaches. The main contribution is a hermeneutic approach to the simplification of programming for specific contexts that combines the hermeneutic spiral and notional machines. The approach is supported by a tool, the Medialib library; the two case studies provide examples of how the approach and tool can be deployed in beginners in CT courses.

We are investigating how non-programmers make sense and solve simple computational problems. We developed a game where a robot has to assemble a sandwich, collecting a specific list of ingredients. Our game follows principles and offers game mechanics typical of games for learning programming. The main innovation of our game is that it visualizes the generality property of algorithms through double levels, that we call twin-worlds, in which one same algorithm is executed by two robots in assembling their sandwiches. Results from early testing with university students enrolled in the education of Media Studies show that the game is usable, levels can be solved at various degrees of complexity (e.g. with and without using loops), and that the students were able to make sense of our twin-worlds levels and formulate general algorithms for both worlds. However, the gathered feedback also highlights the need to explore alternative implementations of the twin-worlds concept.

A central concern in the field of CT deals with how to simplify programming, to make it accessible to individuals without a technical background. Although CT should not be only reduced to it, programming remains the main challenge in the design of CT pedagogical approaches and tools. In the past years we have developed an approach to simplify programming, centered on the creation of a theoretical framework that can describe the learning path of beginner programmers in terms of knowledge distance. Our framework combines the hermeneutic spiral with Notional Machines, NoMs for short, seen as a more operational counterpart to hermeneutics. To simplify the problem-solving aspect of programming for learners, our approach addresses computational problems that are specific to their studies, and leverages learners' preunderstanding of the digital media, that they have experienced as users. To concretize the connection between the hermeneutic spiral and NoMs, we designed a minimalistic Python multimedia library, called Medialib, aimed at enabling secondary education students to create visual media and games with simple code; the choice of multimedia as the main domain to introduce CT spawns directly from the hermeneutic spiral and learners' preunderstanding. This paper compares three case studies that we conducted in the past three years, at universities in Japan and Denmark, and in a Danish gymnasium. The main contribution of this paper is a theoretical understanding of how CT is being constructed as a school subject in Danish high schools and non-technical lines in university. Our studies show a convergence of CT towards design of multimedia in secondary education, especially regarding the high-fidelity prototyping phase.

This paper focuses on orchestration in the digital, augmented classroom, and in particular the challenges involved with content individualization, and on individualized content delivery to a live classroom. The lack of widely adopted efficient digital tools in this area is established via a systematic e-learning literature review and a survey of existing software tools. Mixed methods are used to investigate current orchestration practices and tools adopted by teachers in secondary education institutions in Denmark and Norway. Based on these initial findings, a prototype for a distributed orchestration tool was designed, implemented, and tested using a variation of an A/B experiment, with a group of university students. Test data and post-test interviews showed that the tool was well received and usable even at this early development stage. An interesting discrepancy emerged in our triangulated data about the efficiency in the test tasks: the participants’ perceived, and self-reported, that performance efficiency was lower than what we measured, a phenomenon common when investigating tacit knowledge in practices. These results are discussed, as well as problems with the current prototype and future lines of research.

In this paper we investigate status and trends in the pedagogy of Computational Thinking (CT), in Scandinavia and Eastern Asian countries. A more detailed comparison is drawn between two specific countries: Denmark and Taiwan. Combining a literature review on official information about the implementation of this new subject in schools, interviews with experts and practitioners, we identify core aspects in the pedagogy of CT across sociocultural differences, such as: the role and relation between formal and non-formal learning, the relation between CT and other school subjects, coding as an unavoidable part of CT as a subject, the tendency to adopt and adapt globally shared materials originally imported from the North American educational discourse. We also noticed that in Danish primary and secondary schools, current orchestration strategies in CT-related learning activities tend to leverage hands-on tinkering, peer-learning, and collaborative/group-based problem-solving; similar strategies are adopted in Taiwanese clubs. In this respect, we identify a lack of support for group work in existing e-learning tools for coding. Our main contribution is the definition of a scenario and requirements for a new class of e-learning tools, capable of supporting group-based CT learning activities across different culture. We are currently organizing a series of observations of the teaching practices of coding within CT, in cooperation with our network of contacts in Taiwan and Japan. Future work involves the development of a prototype of the new e-learning tool, iteratively, involving experts from Scandinavia and East Asia.

Teaching introductory programing in university is a challenging task, involving high heterogeneity of students' skills, need to balance theoretical and practical tasks, and the recent, quick-paced move towards the hybrid classroom. We outline the requirements and design of a novel agile tool for semi-linear presentations that can deliver individualized content, trace students' activity and support dynamic formation of groups.