Congratulations to Guttorm Sindre for winning the ITiCSE 2025 Outstanding Reviewer Award
Congratulations to Guttorm Sindre for winning the ITiCSE 2025 Outstanding Reviewer Award
The Excited team would like to congratulate Professor Guttorm Sindre with receiving the ITiCSE 2025 Outstanding Reviewer Award. Guttorm has received this award for his outstanding contribution while reviewing scietific papers for this year’s conference. The Program Co-chairs read all the reviews and discussion for every paper and used a number of different criteria for choosing who should receive this recognition. They greatly honoured Guttorm’s contribution for making the conference a success.
Excited at ITiCSE
Excited at ITiCSE
Three researchers related to Excited participated in the ACM ITiCSE 2025 conference (Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education), which took place in Nijmegen, Netherlands from 27 June to 2 July, with the first three days for pre-conference activities (workshops and working groups) and the last three days for the main conference.
Prof. Monica Divitini, who has led many of the PhD young career activities in Excited, was program chair of the Doctoral Consortium, together with Prof. Stephen Cooper, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. Such doctoral consortia offer great opportunities for PhD students to present their early-stage work and get feedback from experienced researchers in the community.
Postdoc Attiqa Rehman took part in a working group on assessing of team-based Capstone projects. The group’s aim was to investigate challenges in assessing such projects and to provide recommendations.
G: It was very well organized by Radboud University. One of the chairs was Erik Barendsen, whom we know from before [he was opponent in the doctoral defense of Majid Rouhani at IDI/NTNU last year], and both the local and international committee had done excellent work.
Q: How do you feel about your own presentation?
G: I’m quite happy with how it unfolded. When I first saw the program, I felt a little unfortunate that my paper had been scheduled in the very last parallel session, just before the closing ceremony. Sometimes, this can mean low attendance, as some may have left the conference to get to the airport in time for their flights. However, the attendance in the room was good, with lots of questions and engagement. I think I was lucky that the first paper in the session – just before mine – was one of four nominees for the Best Paper Award. Hence, many had come for that talk and stayed throughout the session. Eventually, that paper by Celine Latulipe also ended up winning the Best Paper Award this year.
Q: Celine Latulipe, that somehow rings a bell…?
G: Indeed! Old-timers in Excited may remember that she gave an interesting presentation in one of our webinars during Covid – about her usage of the tool GatherTown to maintain a course-social arena for her students during the lock-down. Her current paper was about something quite different, a much broader statistical study [Latulipe et al.: “Investigating the Impact of Classroom Structure, Sociality, and Inclusivity on Student Perceptions of Mastery” – ed. remark], but you could still see some connection: a key finding was that students who experienced a higher sense of social belonging in the course, also felt a significantly higher degree of mastery. There were plenty other very interesting presentations in the conference, too – a challenge with parallel sessions is that sometimes you wish you could be in several rooms at once!
Q: Do you plan to attend next year’s ITiCSE in Madrid?
G: Maybe, but hard to say at this point. There are so many interesting conferences that are relevant to Excited and myself, but it would be way too much to go to all of them. So, I must pick just one or at most two – and try to have a paper accepted. Otherwise, it is natural to prioritize publication in journals, to reduce the amount of travelling.
Excited at the ACM FSE: Birth of the Education Track at ACM FSE
Excited at the ACM FSE: Birth of the Education Track at ACM FSE
Intervjue with Guttorm Sindre
The ACM FSE (Foundations of Software Engineering) conference has been an annual event for a long time – the one held in Trondheim in the last week of June 2025 was its 33rd iteration. This is the first time this big and prestigious conference is organized in Norway, and the very first time it has a dedicated track for education-related research. Program co-chairs of this Software Engineering Education Track were Prof. Xiaofeng Wang of Univ. Bolzano, Italy, and Excited’s vice leader Prof. Guttorm Sindre.
We had a quick chat with Guttorm after the last session of the Education Track was finished.
Question: How did the first ever Education Track at FSE come about?
Guttorm: It was Jingyue and Leonardo [Li and Montecchi, both at IDI/NTNU; general chair and conference chair of FSE, respectively – editor comment] who asked me last year whether I would try to organize an Education Track at FSE since NTNU was going to host the conference. Given that this was right up our alley concerning Excited’s mission towards dissemination and community-building, it was an offer that I could not refuse.
Question: Was it a lot of work?
Guttorm: I think the organizers of the conference as a whole and of the main research track have had a much bigger job. The Software Engineering Education Track, being a smaller part of the conference, was easier to manage. I also got a lot of help from my co-chair Xiaofeng Wang. Still, there was of course some considerable effort recruiting PC members, eliciting submissions, and organizing the review process to conclude within the notification deadline.
Question: Do you consider this first FSE Education Track a success?
Guttorm: Yes. We got 78 submissions and were able to accept 29 – both good numbers for a very first iteration of such a track. Contributions were grouped in five interesting sessions: Employability/Professional Competence, Student Motivation/Societal Context, Project-based learning, Testing, and Assessment – all of which are key topics in software engineering education research. We had participants from many different countries [cf. pie chart] and there were interesting Q&A interactions after each talk. Especially heart-warming was the fact that at least three of the talks were given by early-career PhD students for whom this was their very first international presentation – and successfully delivered. Our own Somayeh is one example. There was also one who had travelled all the way from America and got her debut peer-reviewed conference presentation here in Trondheim.
Q: Will there be similar Education tracks at future FSE conferences?
A: Based on the good outcome of this year’s Education Track, it is likely that such a track will also be planned for next year’s FSE conference in Montreal, Canada. Thus, I hope that Excited’s effort in enabling the first such track at FSE may have a lasting impact in creating a new, annual international arena for the exchange of experiences and research results related to software engineering education.
Excited at the ACM FSE: Interesting findings from the Customer-Driven Project
Excited at the ACM FSE: Interesting findings from the Customer-Driven Project
Written by Guttorm Sindre
The course TDT4290 Customer-Driven Project – a capstone course for fourth year students in the integrated Master of Computer Science Program – has existed at IDI for more than 40 years. Yet, there are fresh angles from which to research its outcomes. 24th June, postdoc Eleni Chatzidaki from the Learner Computer Interaction (LCI) Lab gave a presentation in the Software Engineering Education Track of the ACM FSE 2025 conference in Trondheim. Her paper “Identifying Project Management Skills in Industry-Driven Capstone Projects” was co-authored with Sofia Papavlasopoulou, Letizia Jaccheri, and Michail Giannakos.
We had a quick chat with Eleni afterwards:
Q: Congratulations on your interesting paper and talk! The Customer-Driven Project is a course with long traditions at IDI/NTNU. How was it to do research about that?
E: Really interesting! The students deliver very comprehensive reports, which gave us a huge amount of data to look at for our document analysis. This was in my opinion a better approach for finding evidence of project management competencies than a questionnaire asking students how much they learnt about project management.
Q: Were there any findings that you were particularly inspired by?
E: I think the students reflected well about what they were doing. Among the teams whose reports we investigated, more than half deliberately rotated roles during the semester so that everyone in the group should have a chance of being project manager for some period.
Q: Do you plan to investigate other potential learning outcomes of the Customer-Driven Project in a similar way?
E: Yes, that’s something I’m already considering, for instance various interpersonal skills, and what evidence of such skills may be indicated from the same reports.
Image: Guttorm Sindre
Excited at the ACM FSE: Somayeh nails her debut presentation
Excited at the ACM FSE: Somayeh nails her debut presentation
Written by Guttorm Sindre
The 33rd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) was hosted by NTNU in Trondheim 23-25 June 2025. In total the conference had more than 600 attendants from around the world. Somayeh Bayat Esfandani, PhD student in Excited, made her debut presentation at an international conference. Her paper “The Impact of Multi-Peer Feedback Summary Organization on Review and Implementation of Feedback” was co-authored with her main supervisor Trond Aalberg.
We did a quick interview with Somayeh after the talk.
Q: Congratulations on your interesting paper and talk! How do you feel now after the presentation?
S: Thank you! This was my first time presenting a paper at an international conference, and I was a bit nervous at the beginning of the presentation, but once I got started, I found my rhythm and really enjoyed sharing my work. It was a valuable experience.
Q: You did very well for a first ever talk, so this must be a good start for you – not just for presenting, but also for your PhD project?
S: Definitely. It is very good to have gotten my paper into a conference like the FSE, and now I have something I can build on for further work.
Q: What is the problem you are addressing?
S: In many courses, students get a lot of feedback, but somewhat too often, they don’t really do much with that feedback afterwards. This can especially be the case in courses using formative peer assessment, where each student gets feedback from several other students. We are investigating whether summarizing this feedback by means of AI can make the feedback more understandable and actionable for the students.
Q: What are your plans for further work?
S: One possibility is to try out the summarization approach in a real course with a bigger number of students – most likely the IT2810 Web Development course. This will give more empirical data. While the current paper reported on student opinions about the summarized feedback, our follow-up study wants to investigate actual outcomes - whether students do engage more with the summarized feedback than with the raw feedback. The ultimate goal is for the summarized feedback to help students learn better.
Images: Guttorm Sindre
Excited at ICT4S
Excited at ICT4S
The annual international conference ICT4S, ICT for Sustainability brings together researchers working with IT and sustainability. In 2025, the conference was held 9-13 June at University College Dublin. Examples of topics discussed include the carbon footprint of large data centers, how system development/programming can be done in a more environmentally friendly way, and how to involve local populations to achieve sustainability in technology projects. Excited v/Birgit Krogstie participated in organizing a workshop on sustainability in IT education. World Café and Open Space were used to organize the discussions, and all 25 participants were active and engaged. Excited also had a poster at the conference, where we presented preliminary results from our ongoing project to offer sustainability resources for use in bachelor's and master's projects at IDI, NTNU. The authors of the poster are B. Krogstie and J. Krogstie as well as Excited teaching assistants Anton Tveito and Camilla Jensen, who have worked on the project in the spring of 2025. There were many interesting discussions around the poster.
Image: John Krogstie
Excited at NKUL
Excited at NKUL
Photo from NKUL Teachmeet: Magnus Nohr
NKUL, National Conference on the Use of ICT in Education and Learning is held annually in Trondheim, and in 2025 the conference took place on 21-23 May. The conference brings together teachers, school leaders, teacher educators and participants from the education sector in general - with a number of different presentations, workshops, interest groups and exhibitors related to ICT for learning. Guttorm Sindre from Excited was on the program committee and participated as session manager in four of the sessions. He also gave a short speech at the conference's TeachMeet at Studentersamfundet on the evening of 21 May, where he spoke about the experiences from the LUR project with a course design in intro programming based on mastery learning.
Excited at he Learning Festival (Læringsfestivalen)
Excited at he Learning Festival (Læringsfestivalen)
The Learning Festival took place in Trondheim on 19-20 May 2025, and this was the 10th anniversary of this conference.
Excited was represented with several contributions. Aamna Rais Ahmed and Line Kolås held a roundtable discussion on the topic "Involving industry representatives in student projects using technology" where Robin Isfold Munkvold was also a co-author. The contribution was related to Aamna's doctoral thesis on project-based learning.
Experiences from other implementations of the LUR project were also presented, where Guttorm Sindre / Gabrielle Hansen / Guri S. Korpås had both a poster and an inspirational workshop. The inspirational workshop also featured students Hanna H. Evensen and Iril Straumbotn, who took the course IT1001 as students in 2023 and were teaching assistants on the course in 2024.
The first keynote was given by Arnold Pears, KTH, who was a member of Excited's Advisory Board in the period 2017-2021, with the topic "AI and learning - what should we do in higher education?" The very last plenary presentation - "Reflections on the Learning Festival 2025" - was given by Lars Lundheim, who is a member of Excited's board. However, this should not be interpreted as meaning that it was Excited from start to finish at the Learning Festival - there were also lots of interesting contributions from other environments from various Norwegian educational institutions, and many interesting impulses to pick up.
Excited educon
Excited at EDUCON
Several NTNU/Excited-persons attended the IEEE EDUCON conference in London 22-25 April 2025, one of the primary international conferences for education-related research and experience exchange in electrical engineering and computer science. In total, seven different papers had co-authors somehow related to Excited. Ottar Osen and Robin Bye from NTNU Ålesund attended to present their paper Integrating Evaluative Judgement Into Engineering Education Assessment: A Practical Approach (also co-authored by Anders Ulstein). Ottar Osen also participated as a panelist in a plenary discussion in the Great Hall, on the topic Integrating Sustainability into Engineering Education Worldwide.
Photo 1: Centre-stage roundtable on sustainability, left to right: Ottar Osen (NTNU), Susan Lord (U. San Diego, USA), Fatima Z. A. Eddahab-Burke (TU Delft, Netherlands), Miri Barak (Technion, Israel), Lisa Bosman (Purdue U., USA)
Talha Mahboob Alam presented his paper Design and Evaluation of Novel Architecture for a Classroom Interaction Tool co-authored with Tomas Klungerbo Olsen, George Adrian Stoica, and Özlem Özgöbek. Talha also received one of two IEEE student awards, presented at the conference banquet.
Isabella Possaghi presented her paper Fun Until the Limits: Students' Perceptions of Design Thinking Projects With Digital Tools, co-authored with Feiran Zhang, Kshitij Sharma, and Sofia Papavlasopoulou. Eleni Chatzidaki presented her paper Gamification in Informal Science Education: Enhancing Children's Motivation and Engagement With VitenChallenge Application, co-authored with Elisabeth Phung Nguyen Doan, Emma Thoresen Kjelstrup, Sofia Papavlasopoulou, and Michail Giannakos. Guttorm Sindre presented his paper Mastery Learning in CS1 With High Transparency Tests: Challenges for Fairness Among Task Variants.
Photo2: Guttorm Sindre presenting his paper.
Bjørn Klefstad and Grethe Sandstrak (NTNU Trondheim) and Arne Styve (NTNU Ålesund) attended to present their paper Redesigning Computer Science Programs for Next Generation - Perceptions Versus Experiences (also co-authored by Kiran Raja from NTNU Gjøvik, the work thus spanning all three campuses, related to the cross-campus Bachelor Engineering degree). Arne Styve was also the co-author of another paper, Stimulating Critical Thinking in a Web Programming Module With Generative AI Tools, written together with Usman Naeem (Queen Mary University of London), and Outi Tuulia Virkki (Haaga-Helia University, Finland) – in addition to chairing two sessions at the conference.
Photo 3: Networking at the conference. From left to right: Frank Dieball (Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Germany), Guttorm Sindre, Outi Virkki (Finland), Irene Rothe (Bonn-Rhein-Sieg), Corinna Thomser (Bonn-Rhein-Sieg), Grethe Sandstrak, Bjørn Klefstad, and Arne Styve. Irene and Corinna have had a long-term collaboration with Grethe, and Outi is one of Arne’s co-authors.
CatchIDI 2025 news
CatchIDI 2025
- Written March 24, 2025 by Anna Holden Jacobsen/Excited
On March 17, Excited helped organize Catch IDI, a conference aimed at inspiring and motivating staff and students at the IDI faculty. Our task was to put together an academic program full of presentations on various research projects, master’s theses, and studies from the IT field here at NTNU in Trondheim. The talks covered topics such as the use of AI in nuclear medicine, the classification of right-wing extremism on social media, and why we should all be feminists in software development. The day was a great success, packed with exciting academic content, and we ended it with a lovely dinner and entertainment at the Radisson Blu Royal Garden. Thanks to everyone who contributed to making this year’s Catch IDI yet another successful conference!
Trygve Pløhn defended his PhD on September 26, 2024, with the thesis Exploring Player Engagement in Social and Pervasive Learning Games. His main supervisor was Prof. Trond Aalberg, who is also the leader of Cluster 3 on Tools and Infrastructure at Excited. The opponents at the defense were Prof. Staffan Björk from the University of Gothenburg and Dr. Elisa Rubegni from Lancaster University. The internal committee member and administrator was Guttorm Sindre.
Photo: Trond Aalberg/NTNU
The topic of the thesis is pervasive games, i.e., games where you cannot simply sit in front of a screen or at a desk, but must move around in the environment (e.g., on campus or in the local area) to progress in the game. When such games are used in an educational context, it is common for students to play as part of a mandatory teaching program. A challenge often seen in such situations is the wide variation in students' motivation to participate in the game, and a key issue that Pløhn addresses is how to motivate students who were initially less motivated.
How ePortfolios can help students recognize their competencies
How ePortfolios can help students recognize their competencies
Photo: NTNU
The research article Enabling computing students to recognize acquired competencies with ePortfolios, published in Computer Science Education, is now available online! The first author is Hege Annette Olstad, who in her PhD project has investigated students’ use of ePortfolios and in particular how ePortfolios can help students recognize the competencies they gain throughout their studies. Awareness of these competencies is closely linked to students’ learning, resulting from, as well as fueling, reflection. Also, awareness of one’s competencies helps students convey their knowledge and skills to employers and make well-founded career choices. The research presented in the article was funded through Excited Centre of Excellent IT Education.
dividing line
Interview with Majid Rouhani: Defence on continuing education in programming for teachers
Photo: Swetlana Fast/NTNU
Interview with Majid Rouhani: Defence on continuing education in programming for teachers
Written by Guttorm Sindre, 8 May 2024
On 3 May 2024 there was a defence for the degree Dr. Philos at IDI, NTNU, when professor Majid Rouhani defended his thesis with the title "An Online Professional Development Framework for In-service Teachers: Challenges and Opportunities of Learning and Teaching Programming".
The starting point for the thesis is research Rouhani has done at NTNU's continuing education offer in programming for teachers, an offer he himself has been central to the development of. The initiative for this continuing education offer was taken by Excited in 2017, when Trond Aalberg (then sub-project manager for Excited P2) ran a pilot for a continuing education course in programming for teachers. Based on this pilot, an application was submitted to Udir in early 2018 for support via the KOMPiS program to create an online offer of 15 credits, in the form of two courses: one in basic programming, and one in advanced applied programming. The subject teachers for these two subjects were Elise Vonstad and Majid Rouhani, who have put a lot of effort into further developing the scheme, and there are now several hundred teachers who take these subjects annually.
There are currently very many teachers in grades 8-13. stages that need to learn programming, as this has received increasing focus in Udir's framework plans, both as a subject in itself, and for application in, among other things, mathematics and physics. At the same time, the specific needs can vary widely from teacher to teacher. Some will teach programming as a subject in itself, while others will use it in the context of mathematics or other subjects. Some will program ordinary PCs, while others will program mini robots such as Arduino or Raspberry Pi. The key to the success of Rouhani's scheme is a course design that scales to a large number of course participants, but which at the same time provides enough flexibility for each teacher to specialize in the type of programming that is most useful for their teaching practice in school. This is achieved, among other things, with a significant element of project-based learning in the subject.
The thesis is not a result of the teaching itself, but of Rouhani's research on the effects of the teaching scheme, how it supports the course participants' opportunity for self-regulated learning and builds up during their further practice as teachers of and with programming in schools. It consists of 9 peer-reviewed articles published at international conferences. Monica Divitini from Excited has also been involved in the research and is a co-author on many of the articles. The committee that assessed the thesis was Prof. Said Hadjerrouit from UiA, Kristiansand, Prof. Erik Barendsen from Radboud University, the Netherlands and Birgit Krogstie as internal member and administrator. Both external opponents had thorough and interesting discussions with Rouhani during the defence, while the thesis was recognized as a very solid piece of work.
Question: How did you experience the dialogue with the opponents during the defence?
Answer: I think it was a nice and constructive discussion where the research and design methods were reflected upon. The feedback from the opponents was that the defence was engaging and demonstrated good knowledge in the field.
Question: Have you received a lot of feedback from teachers who have taken your course afterwards, for example about how the new skills have been useful for them in their own teaching at school?
Answer: Here I can e.g. refer to an interview we had with one of the participants who shows how programming has changed her teaching and how programming has increased the engagement of her students.
We have also carried out a study to precisely see the effect of the program on the teachers' practice in the classroom. The evaluation shows a very positive impact on the teachers' self-confidence and attitudes towards teaching programming. Several expressed that they could not teach programming before the courses, but that they now felt able to teach it in their subjects. Other teachers felt that they could have taught programming already before the courses, but expressed that they felt even more confident about it afterwards. In general, the teachers felt that the in-service training had a positive impact on their attitudes and helped them see the relevance and benefits of programming in teaching. Although the teachers perceived that their programming skills weakened over time when they were not actively using them, they still felt that they could refresh their skills quickly when needed. This suggests that the further education had a lasting effect on their self-esteem. Furthermore, the evaluation showed that teachers who had taught or used programming in their classes in the past year felt more competent to teach it, indicating that they were given a foundation on which to build.
An important point to take away is that the teacher's role is changing in response to the increasing emphasis on programming education. Programming is a demanding subject, especially for beginners, considering that there are several skills that must be used when using programming as an aid to solve problems in different subject areas. This attitude is important to take into the classroom. Becoming aware that the teachers must develop in step with the students when it comes to programming can influence their motivation in a positive direction.
Question: What is the role of a teacher in an online course that is laid out in a flexible way to take into account the different needs and interests of the course participants? Is it more demanding than "one-size-fits-all" teaching?
Answer: Surprisingly, this course is no more demanding than "one-size-fits-all", perhaps quite the opposite. We have developed a scheme where we use participants as resources/contributors to the programme. After all, they are both educators and experts in the subject areas in which they will apply programming. I myself have extensive experience from the industry and have gradually become much more aware of how important it is to understand the user and the problem area when creating a computer system. We know that many IT projects are not successful, and part of the reason may be precisely that you do not know the subject area you are building a system for well enough. This is also confirmed by my own experience of working with large IT systems.
Facilitating so that teachers can link programming closely to subject areas they know well is therefore an important success factor. They have a better starting point in succeeding in the integration and implementation of programming in their subjects than what IT experts would have been able to do. In addition, they possess pedagogical competence, which further contributes to success. For us as instructors in the programme, it is important to set up a scheme that encourages and engages teachers in learning programming. And we have largely succeeded in this through studying problem areas and opportunities that programming provides from the teachers' perspective.
Through a project, the teachers develop their own teaching plans which they can use in their classes immediately after they have finished the programme. This turns out to be a great motivation for them. They become independent, and through collaboration with other teachers they get to develop a teaching plan that they see the benefits of and have faith in.
They put in more effort to reach the goal. Almost all (more than 95%) of the participants complete the program, which is very high for online education.
We conduct regular webinars where we address various relevant topics that most people can benefit from. Teaching plans that have been developed by other teachers from previous years are made available as resources as a starting point for developing new and even more adapted plans. Teachers are also good at using each other to discuss and find answers to their problems. This makes the program scalable. It therefore does not require much more time from us instructors than a course of the "one-size-fits-all" type.
Question: Can similar flexible teaching arrangements with a strong focus on self-regulated learning also be relevant for regular campus-based studies?
Answer: The form of teaching we are currently implementing for teachers will not be directly transferable to campus-based studies with students coming straight from upper secondary schools. The scheme requires that the participants know the subject area in which they will apply programming. In contrast, I believe that generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) can pave the way for more self-regulated learning in normal campus-based studies.
Generative AI has entered teaching too fully, both for students and teachers. I think self-regulated learning is to a greater extent possible in campus-based studies now as a consequence of this. The students have the opportunity to self-learn the basic skills through the use of AI. Within programming, research shows that developers can save between 20-50% on writing code, documenting, and re-invoicing code. This also affects our focus when it comes to what we should teach in programming. This can open up more self-regulating forms of teaching for campus-based studies.
Question: How is the way forward now? What are your ambitions for further education-related research and innovation after completing your PhD?
Answer: There is still much that remains to be researched in connection with the further development of this framework. Some of the most important areas are testing the scheme in other environments and studying the many teaching schemes that have been developed by teachers in order to standardise/develop good teaching materials for schools. Furthermore, I believe that the concept we have developed can also be taken into other contexts, e.g. competence development of colleagues at university level. The context is comparable in that the participants have expertise in their subject areas and are mainly interested in programming that can be used in their projects (both in the context of teaching and research). One can imagine that the participants enter the program with a project and its data. Through the program, they learn how to use programming to complete their project using programming.
Writing-seminar at Digs; Writing Scientific Articles
- 26.04.24
Excited has held a two-day writing seminar at Digs in downtown Trondheim, as part of our seminar series for early career researchers. The focus was entirely on scientific articles: argumentation, structure, summaries, plans for the writing process, and so on – all under the expert guidance of Prof. Monica Divitini. During the "shut up and write" sessions, there was complete silence and diligent work. Now, we just wait for new, exciting publications in IT education research!
Shut up and write!
Photo: Birgit R. Krogstie/NTNUPhoto: Birgit R. Krogstie/NTNU
