ITICSE

Welcome to ITiCSE 2015 in Vilnius!

The ITiCSE conference celebrates its 20th anniversary in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania and the geographical center of Europe, so declared in 1989 by scientists of the French National Institute of Geography.

ITiCSE will be held on July 6--8, starting on Lithuania's Statehood Day (July 6). This is an annual public holiday that commemorates the coronation in 1253 of Mindaugas as the first and only King of Lithuania. The conference venue is the Parliament buildings (Seimas) of the Republic of Lithuania, and the conference dinner is to served in the reconstructed Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, one of the most famous in Europe in the 15--17th centuries. ITiCSE 2015 is hosted by Vilnius University, one of the oldest and most famous establishments of higher education in Eastern and Central Europe, founded in 1579. The conference organizers represent the Lithuanian research group of Informatics and Informatics Engineering Didactics at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics of Vilnius University.

This conference brings together delegates from all over the world to address pressing issues in computing education. In addition to invited lectures, papers, panels, posters, and tips, techniques & courseware sessions, the conference provides facilities and exposure for working groups and exhibitions.

The conference continues to be truly international with a total of 170 submissions from 40 countries on six continents, with authors from Africa (4), Asia (50), Europe (151), North America (119), Oceania (51), and South America (17). These submissions consisted of 124 research papers, 1 panel, 9 working group proposals, and 36 proposals for posters or for tips, techniques & courseware.

All research papers were double blind reviewed by at least four reviewers, though most papers received five or six reviews. A meta-review was conducted by the members of the conference committee to ensure the reliability of the reviews and to make recommendations to the chairs. A final selection phase was conducted by the program chairs who reviewed all reviews and meta-review recommendations before making their final decisions. As a result of this process, 54 research papers (43.5%) were selected for presentation and inclusion in the proceedings. The authors of the accepted papers come from 17 different countries on five continents.

All poster submissions were blind reviewed by two members of the conference committee, and tips, techniques & courseware submissions were blind reviewed by three members of the conference committee. Submissions in these categories were then reviewed by the conference chair before selection by the program chairs for final inclusion in the conference. Twenty-four were accepted, representing authors from 15 countries.

The two keynote speakers address the learning of programming and computational thinking. Professor Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, will give a talk titled In Defense of Programming, which defends the (perhaps controversial) position that programming is the fundamental activity of CS. In the other keynote talk Professor Maciej M. Syslo from Nicolaus Copernicus University and University of Wrocław, Poland, will address algorithmic nand computational thinking as the way to computing for all students.

ITiCSE is famous for its working groups. Participating in a working group provides a unique opportunity to work with people from different countries who are interested and knowledgeable in the area of the working group. It is also one of the best ways to become part of the ITiCSE community. Seven working groups have been accepted over a broad spectrum of topics. The working groups range from general topics, such as computing education terminology, CS education in K-9 and K-12 schools, and designing an IT curriculum framework for graduates in 2025, to more specific topics such as developing a repository for high school CS questions, visual assessment tools and metadata annotations, and how students construct solutions to programming problems. The leaders of the accepted working groups come from over 13 countries.

Welcome to Vilnius and enjoy the vicennial ITiCSE conference and Lithuania's Statehood Day!