Europe faces persistent challenges in achieving digital-skills targets and addressing gender imbalance across ICT fields. Informatics education remains uneven in curriculum quality, pedagogy, and assessment practices. THINKER proposes a transformative, pan-European model that supports authentic, gender-inclusive, and evidence-based approaches to teaching and assessing informatics in upper-primary and lower-secondary education.

This presentation immerses participants in the THINKER pedagogical framework, which integrates authentic learning, computational thinking, inquiry-based design, TPACK, and gender-inclusive teaching principles. Participants will explore practical examples drawn from project activities across more than 100 schools and early teacher-training pathways.

This presentation is ideal for teachers, initial teacher-education providers, curriculum designers, digital-skills programme leads, researchers, and policymakers.

Population cancer screening involves complex decisions about who should be screened, which tests should be used, and how limited resources should be allocated. These decisions require balancing potential benefits with possible harms, including false positives, false negatives, and unnecessary follow-up investigations. Supporting students to understand these trade-offs can be challenging in traditional teaching contexts, where screening concepts are often introduced theoretically and students have limited opportunities to explore how different decisions influence outcomes.

This practitioner presentation describes the development of an interactive digital simulation designed to place students in the role of decision-makers responsible for designing a screening strategy for a hypothetical population. During an online teaching session, students interact with the simulation by selecting key parameters, including the screening test, available funding for screening, and eligibility criteria such as age, sex, and selected risk factors.

Based on these choices, the simulation generates a report summarising outcomes across both screened and unscreened populations. The report includes estimates of true positives, false positives, false negatives, and true negatives. Students then use this report as the basis for a summative assignment in which they analyse the outcomes of their screening strategy and reflect on the implications of their decisions.

By allowing students to experiment with different screening scenarios and observe how their choices influence outcomes, the simulation supports exploratory learning and encourages critical reflection on the complexities involved in designing population screening programmes. The presentation will outline the design of the simulation, its integration into teaching and assessment, and reflections on its use in supporting student engagement with screening decisions.

Teaching coding to students who are not computer scientists presents a persistent challenge: before learners can write their first line of code, they must navigate software installation, environment configuration, and dependency management. These technical barriers disproportionately exclude students with limited computing resources or technical confidence, raising a question central to EdTech 2026: who are we designing coding education for, and who is being left behind? Recent advances in open-source technologies offer transformative opportunities to address this gap.

This paper reviews the evolving landscape of technologies for delivering interactive coding tutorials, drawing on several years of experience teaching R and Python to social science students at Dublin City University. We trace a trajectory from server-dependent to fully serverless solutions, evaluating each approach in terms of accessibility, scalability, maintenance burden, and pedagogical effectiveness.

We begin with cloud-hosted environments that provide full IDE experiences without local installation, such as Google Colab, Posit Cloud, and GitHub Codespaces. While powerful, these solutions depend on institutional licences, user authentication, or cloud compute resources that may be constrained or unavailable.

We then examine container-based approaches, particularly MyBinder, which packages a GitHub repository into a live, reproducible computing environment accessible via a single URL. This approach, used in the DCU R Tutorials and DCU Python Tutorials projects, eliminates installation barriers entirely but relies on shared server infrastructure with limited scalability and cold-start delays.

The primary focus of this paper is the emerging generation of fully serverless solutions powered by WebAssembly. Using the Quarto Live framework, educators can embed interactive, editable code cells for both R (via webR) and Python (via Pyodide) directly into static HTML documents. These tutorials require no server, no authentication, and no installation: they run entirely in the learner's browser and can be freely hosted on platforms such as GitHub Pages. We discuss the pedagogical affordances of Quarto Live, including built-in exercise scaffolding, grading algorithms, and reactive outputs, and reflect on practical trade-offs such as package availability and initial load times.

We conclude by arguing that serverless interactive tutorials represent a significant step toward more equitable and inclusive coding education, lowering barriers not only for learners but also for the educators who create and share these resources.

This presentation explores the design, development, and user testing of Tóraíocht; and immersive narrative video game created to support Irish language acquisition among primary school pupils (ages 9–12) in Gaelscoileanna. Developed within a Celtic-futurist aesthetic inspired by Irish mythology, this pilot project game delivers a story-driven adventure experience entirely through Gaeilge na Mumhan.

This presentation investigates how narrative immersion, player agency, and environmental storytelling can reinforce dialect-specific language learning. Rather than relying on decontextualised vocabulary drills, the game embeds Gaeilge na Mumhan* organically within character dialogue, quest mechanics, and interactive problem-solving. Players must interpret linguistic cues, engage in branching conversations, and make decisions that require meaningful comprehension and production of Irish.

The presentation will outline the pedagogical framework informing the design, drawing on principles from game-based learning and communicative language teaching. It will detail how dialectal features of Gaeilge na Mumhan were integrated into scriptwriting, voice performance, and world-building to ensure linguistic authenticity. Particular attention will be given to age-appropriate user experience design, balancing cognitive challenge with accessibility and narrative engagement.

The project demonstrates how culturally grounded immersive game design can contribute to Irish language engagement by positioning Irish not only as a subject of study, but as a fun and exciting adventure.
*Gaeilge na Mumhan is the Irish dialect of the Munster region, in the south of Ireland.