The IFIP TC3 Open Conference on Computers in Education (OCCE) 2018 was held in Linz, Austria, from June 25–28, 2018, with a doctoral consortium event held on June 24, 2018. Participation was truly international, with contributions from authors ranging from Armenia to the United Kingdom, from Botswana to Taiwan, from Colombia to South Africa, and from Kyrgyzstan to New Zealand. In total, lead authors came from 31 countries, across five continents.
In total, 63 papers were submitted to the conference (all subjected to double-blind review by two independent reviewers), 35 were submitted for consideration for this post-conference book (with 18 subjected to a second round of double-blind review by two independent reviewers), and, following these later reviews, 27 were selected and accepted. On average, with 162 reviews undertaken in total (independent of reviews by the editors), each of the 63 papers were subjected to 2.6 reviews, and each of the 27 selected papers were subjected to 6 reviews. We are delighted to present the outcomes of the research undertaken by these 27 authors and their collaborators in this volume.
The conference theme “Empowering Learners for Life in the Digital Age” drives our attention to the increasingly urgent need to allow each citizen to be able to face a society dramatically changed by technological evolution. Such a broad topic can be addressed in different ways and with different perspectives, which means that not only new skills and abilities are to be identified and addressed, but that the learning environment as a whole is to be reconsidered and questioned. In essence, the relationship among learners, digital tools, and knowledge is not simple and direct, and must be approached in a critical way with due consideration for the complexity of the underlying processes. The contributions that have been selected for this book discuss a number of key emerging topics and evolving practices in this area that have been divided into seven sections. These sections focus on: computational thinking; programming and computer science education; teachers’ education and professional development; games-based learning and gamification; learning in specific and disciplinary contexts; learning in social networking environments; and self-assessment, e-assessment, and e-examinations.