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Dev Camps are events that enable participants to tackle challenges using software tools and different kinds of hardware devices in collaborative project-style activities. The participants conceptualize and develop their solutions in a self-directed way, involving technical, organizational and social skills. In this sense, they are autonomous producers or “makers”. The Dev Camp activity format resonates with skills such as communication, critical thinking, creativity, decision-making and planning and can be considered as a bridge between education and industry. In this paper we present and analyse our experience from a series of such events that were co-organized between an industrial partner acting as a host and several university partners. We take this as an indication to envision new opportunities for project-based learning in more formal educational scenarios.

In graph visualizations, dynamic networks are a special challenge. A typical approach is visualizing the network at several points in time. Drawing these individual time slices often leads to changes in the layout that distract viewers from important information about individual nodes. In this article, we present a mathematical model to quantify the visual stability of dynamic graph drawings. The model takes into account structural and layout-oriented characteristics of the graphs. In order to validate the model, we conducted a study using questionnaires and an eye-tracking device. The participants were asked to track nodes in a dynamic network with three different methods. Then, we compared these methods based on the proposed model, user feedback (questionnaires) and behavioral data (eye-tracking). The results suggest that dynamic graph drawings which assign a fixed position on the canvas to every actor in the network improve the efficiency of the visual search. Nonetheless, more time is required to process the image. In contrast to that, those dynamic graph drawings with a constant shape or with a minimal number of changes require less time to process the image but lose efficiency of visual search.

After the publication of this work [1] an error was noticed in the title of the article. The title in the original article reads: “From Making to Learning”: introducing Dev Camps as an educational paradigm for Re-inventing Problem-based Learning. However the correct article title should read: “From Making to Learning”: introducing Dev camps as an educational paradigm for Re-inventing Project-based Learning. This has been corrected here.