Type of Publication: Group of Editors

Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Primary and Secondary Computing Education (WiPSCE 2020)

Editor:

Brinda, T.; Armoni, M.

Publisher:

ACM Press

Location(s):

New York

Publication Date:

2020

ISBN:

978-1-4503-8759-0

Language:

English

Link to complete version:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3421590

Citation:

Download BibTeX

Abstract

This volume contains keynotes, papers, and posters presented and discussed at the 15th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education (WiPSCE) held from October 28th to 30th, 2020 for the first time ever as a virtual conference. The worldwide corona pandemic in 2020 made it necessary to cancel the originally planned venue, which was Essen in Germany.

Research in primary and secondary computing education is a young field with strong ties to national educational systems. Nevertheless, its theories, methods, and results are internationally applicable and of interest to the community of researchers and practitioners as well. WiPSCE aims at improving the exchange of research and practice relevant to teaching and learning in primary and secondary computing education, teacher training, and related research.

This year, we introduced some slight changes to the submission and review process of the conference. We worked with two separate submission deadlines: a first one for full and short research papers and practical reports only and a second one (after the first notification deadline) for posters and demos. At the first submission deadline, we received 51 submissions in the categories full paper, short paper, and practical report, which shows that the K12 computing education community is quite active. Each full paper was reviewed by at least three members of the International Program Committee (IPC), short papers and practical reports were reviewed by at least two members of the IPC. Of the submissions we received, we directly accepted eleven submissions (ten full papers and one short paper). 22 further submissions were regarded as being acceptable in another category. For these submissions we introduced the concept of conditional acceptance, which means that they had to be resubmitted at the second submission deadline together with new submissions of posters and demos. After the resubmission, each of these conditionally accepted papers was re-reviewed by one of the original reviewers of the first round of reviews. At the second deadline, we also received 12 new submissions of posters, which were reviewed by two members of the IPC each. For the conference we finally accepted 34 submissions (ten full papers, three short papers, five practical reports and 16 posters), leading to an overall acceptance rate of 53%. The reviews were conducted in a double-blind way and according to international standards in our field. Discussions between reviewers were encouraged and moderated by the program chairs.

This volume also includes two invited keynote abstracts. Maya Israel (University of Florida, USA) presented her work on “Countering pedagogy for the ‘privileged’ in CS for All: A Universal Design for Learning theoretical and practical lens for addressing the needs of students with disabilities in K-8 CS education” and Ute Schmid (University of Bamberg, Germany) reported about “AI goes to school – learning about and learning with artificial intelligence”. We would like the thank the keynote speakers for accepting our invitation.

The WiPSCE 2020 was financially supported by the “Interdisciplinary Center for Educational Research” of the University of Duisburg-Essen and by the Adesso company. We are very grateful for the generous support.

Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to everyone who was involved in the organization of the conference and to everyone who contributed to the conference in one or another way and we warmly invite everyone to join us at the WiPSCE 2021.

September 2020,

Torsten Brinda
Michal Armoni