Applied Education Technologies

Two papers, two conferences, and two very different perspectives on primary computing education. We are happy to share two new paper acceptances from our group. 🎉 The research paper Soft Competition in Tangible Game-Based Learning for Primary Computing Education has been accepted at the 15th International Conference on Games and Learning Alliance and will be presented in L'Aquila, Italy. Competition can make learning games engaging, but rankings, speed, and direct comparison can also create social pressure. In this paper, we introduce soft competition, a design pattern that keeps visible progress and a clear win condition while moving away from learner-versus-learner comparison.

Are you passionate about education and eager to make a difference in the academic journey of students? We invite motivated students like you to join our team as a tutor for Introduction to Programming or Patterns in Software Engineering and play a key role in shaping the learning experience. This is a unique opportunity to deepen your software engineering and programming skills while helping your peers. Join us and become a valuable member of our highly motivated, international student team! 🚀

The work-in-progress paper µEd API: Towards a Shared API for Education Microservices has been accepted at the 13th ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (L@S 26) and will be presented in Seoul, South Korea, as part of the joint Festival of Learning 2026. Education platforms today often lock institutions into a single ecosystem. Whoever wants AI-powered feedback, assessment, or chat-based tutoring is left with whatever the platform happens to offer — or has to build a custom integration for every new tool. Learning at scale depends on exactly this kind of domain-specific automation, so the choice of platform quietly turns into a choice about what is pedagogically possible.

The paper On-Premise Kubernetes in Software Engineering Education: An Experience Report has been accepted at the ICSE-SEET track (Software Engineering Education and Training) and will be presented at ICSE’26 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Modern software engineering courses increasingly need Kubernetes experience, but many universities face strict data protection requirements, limited budgets, and constrained IT resources. This paper reports how we designed and operated a multi-node, on-premise Kubernetes setup tailored to these educational constraints using RKE2, Ansible, and Rancher.

Lukas and Ramona have been awarded the Women in CIT Travel Awards. This allows both to attend conferences in the respective fields and fosters exchange within the international STEM community. Lukas will attend the Serious Play Conference Europe in Mainz, discussing insights from his master’s thesis. Ramona will join the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference, a key venue for research on human-computer interaction and computing education. Both look forward to engaging with peers and gaining new impulses for their ongoing research projects.