Guest Editor:

Marina Umaschi Bers, Boston College, bers@bc.edu, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0206-1846

Brief Description of the Special Issue:

The journal IEEE-RITA Ibero-American Journal of Learning Technologies, the official publication of the IEEE Education Society, invites submissions for a special issue entitled “A Palette of Virtues: Values Education through Computer Science.”so This special issue aims to gather research that explores how computer science, particularly programming and computational thinking, can become not only a technical skill but also an expressive language for fostering human values, emotional intelligence, and ethical reflection.

Inspired by the “Coding as Another Language” (CAL) approach and the metaphor of a palette of virtues, we seek contributions that showcase how digital technologies can promote inclusive, humanistic, and socially engaged education, especially at early and primary education levels.

We welcome empirical studies, theoretical papers, classroom experiences, design-based research, and innovative educational proposals that demonstrate how learning to program can be integrated with values such as empathy, cooperation, justice, environmental care, equity, or digital citizenship.

Contributions that propose inclusive, collaborative, and open approaches will be especially valued. Suggested (but not limited to) topics include:

  • Experiences with the “Coding as Another Language (CAL)” approach
  • Development of ethical thinking through code in school contexts
  • Serious games and gamified environments for teaching values
  • Socio-emotional learning in computing education
  • Culturally inclusive approaches to computer science teaching
  • Computational thinking as a civic and ethical competence
  • Digital storytelling, AI and narrative design for virtue education
  • Co-creation and participatory design in values-based programming initiatives
  • Teacher training in digital pedagogies focused on the CAL approach
  • The role of imagination, storytelling, play, and creativity in CAL proposals
  • Family and community involvement in values-based coding processes
  • Teacher training in CAL methodologies and child-centered pedagogies
  • Longitudinal studies on the impact of CAL on holistic development
  • Design and evaluation of CAL curricula for early childhood across contexts

This special issue will contribute to building a shared and pluralistic vision of the challenges and opportunities of a humanistic and inclusive approach to CS education. It seeks to establish an academic space that promotes international cooperation and the generation of actionable knowledge for the sustainable implementation of educational proposals that integrate programming with values education from the earliest stages of learning.

Keywords:

Coding as Another Language (CAL), Computational Thinking, Childhood Programming, Values Education, Humanistic Digital Literacy, Learning Technologies, Educational Robotics with Ethical Purpose, Technology-Based Educational Interventions, Technology Teacher Training.

Publication and Submission Deadline:

IEEE-RITA Ibero-American Journal of Learning Technologies is now accepting submissions for the special issue “A Palette of Virtues: CS Education through Humanistic and Inclusive Approaches” under a continuous publication model. This means that accepted papers will be published immediately after the peer-review and final editing process is completed, without waiting for the monograph to be closed.

The submission deadline is October 30, 2025. The academic, research, and professional communities are invited to submit original papers addressing the topics outlined in this call.

Submission Guidelines:

Articles must be submitted in English. After evaluation, all accepted articles will be published in their English version on IEEE Xplore, along with a Spanish or Portuguese version made freely accessible to the authors via the VAEP-RITA portal.

All articles are published free of charge if they do not exceed 10 pages.

Submissions must be made through the IEEE Author portal.

This special issue accepts extended versions of papers previously presented at conferences. In such cases, authors must upload the published conference paper as a supplementary file and explicitly state in the introduction that the new submission is an extended version, including a reference to the original and a description of the new contributions (at least 30% of new and substantial content, with a different title and abstract).

As this is a special issue, papers accepted in the first phase with major revisions that do not meet the required improvements in the second round will be definitively rejected.