Software Engineering Education and Training (SEET)ICSE 2026

Call for Papers

Being a software engineer goes far beyond just writing code. Software engineers need to possess a balanced set of soft and technical skills that allow them to solve real-world problems, work in teams to develop complex, high-quality software systems, efficiently evolve and maintain these systems, all while catering to users’ changing needs. Many paths could be taken and combined to acquire and develop this skill set, from formal education to on-the-job training, from coding clubs to boot camps, by using online or offline platforms and resources, etc.

ICSE SEET 2026 is a venue interested in all these paths and aspects of teaching and training future and current software engineers. ICSE SEET is the premier venue that brings together educators from both academia and industry worldwide to share and discuss cutting-edge results and experiences on how to best shape software engineers who are able to deal with real-world challenges. We invite you to join us to continue to grow our collective knowledge in the field of software engineering education and training.

Topics of Interest

ICSE SEET 2026 seeks original contributions covering all dimensions of learning and teaching software engineering topics. We welcome a variety of papers addressing challenges, innovations, and best practices in software engineering education and training. Contributions may address different levels and contexts, including, but not limited to, primary and secondary education, university education at undergraduate and graduate levels, coding clubs, hackathons, bootcamps, industrial training and certification, and informal learning and training.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Foundational research on software engineering skills

• Methods of teaching software engineering skills

• Methods of evaluating, assessing, and measuring software engineering skills

• Evaluation and assessment in software engineering education

• Evaluations of teaching and assessment methods in software engineering

• Empirical studies describing software engineering education contexts

• Pedagogical approaches supporting software engineering education and training in distributed and remote settings

• Learning technologies and tools that support software engineering education and training

• Automated evaluation of software engineering skills

• Role of soft skills (communication, collaboration, teamwork, organization, negotiation, conflict management) for software engineers

• Studies of equity, diversity, and inclusion in software engineering education and training

• Ethical and societal concerns (e.g., sustainability, human values) in software engineering education and training

• Onboarding and on-the-job training of software engineers

• Continuing education of software engineers

• Extra-curricular training of software engineering students (e.g., through hackathons, bootcamps)

• Certification and training for professional software engineers

• Use of tools, online platforms, and resources for software engineering education

• Use of Artificial Intelligence in software engineering education

• Role of culture and gender in software engineering education and training

• Introducing software engineering topics to children in primary and secondary education

• Encouraging synergy between academia and industry in software engineering education and training

Submission Categories

Research Paper (max 10 pages, plus up to 2 pages for references) A research paper must address a topic related to software engineering education and/or training using appropriate research techniques and proper scholarly writing. Negative and mixed findings, same as replications, are welcome.

Experience Report (max 10 pages, plus up to 2 pages for references) An experience report provides anecdotal evidence by describing an experience related to software engineering education and training (typically a course, a teaching or training technique or strategy, or an assessment method) and interprets the experience in terms of actionable advice and lessons learned, but does not need to evaluate it or use rigorous research methods to support its claims. Negative and mixed findings, same as replications, are welcome, provided they can support advice or lessons learned.

Idea Paper (max 5 pages, plus 1 page of references) An idea paper must present a new software engineering education and training idea with a proposed formal evaluation strategy, possibly with some preliminary or informal results. Ideally, the presentation of ideas leads to collaborations in the community and inspire future work, which may evolve into a full research paper submitted to future editions of the conference..

Tool Paper (max 5 pages, plus 1 page of references) A tool paper describes a tool or technology that supports software engineering education and training. Papers in this category should discuss the impact of the tool on aspects such as didactics or the learning process. Tools must be available online so they can be evaluated (also possible on a trial basis) and be mature enough.

Extended abstract for talks (max 2 pages, plus 1 page of references) An extended abstract gives researchers and educators the possibility to propose a presentation without the inclusion of a paper following the categories outlined above. Those talks are encouraged to share practical experiences and/or visionary insights and provide the ground for active discussions during the event. Extended abstracts will be included in the publication of the proceedings.

SEET submissions should not exceed their respective category page limit, including all text, figures, tables, and appendices. The page limits are strict and non-compliance will result in a desk-rejection.

Evaluation Criteria

Submissions will be evaluated based on their category:

• Research Papers will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Soundness, Verifiability, Presentation

• Experience Reports will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Actionability, Lessons, Presentation

• Idea Papers will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Soundness, Presentation

• Tool Papers will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Presentation

• Extended Abstracts will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Presentation/potential for discussions at the event

The evaluation criteria for SEET 2026 papers are defined as follows:

• Relevance: The extent to which the paper is relevant to SEET.

• Significance: The extent to which the paper is well-motivated and its contributions are original and important, with respect to the existing literature on software engineering education and training.

• Soundness: The extent to which the paper’s contributions are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods and whether the paper discusses meaningfully the research methods’ limitations and threats to the validity of the findings.

• Verifiability: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to support independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions. This includes public availability of research data. In case where this is not possible, an explicit statement on why such data cannot be made publicly available is mandatory.

• Actionability: The extent to which the paper provides actionable advice with clear take-away messages.

• Lessons: The extent to which the paper meaningfully discusses lessons learned in terms of what went right, what went wrong, and what could be improved if the experience is repeated.

• Presentation: The extent to which the paper’s organization and quality of writing meet the standard: the paper is well-structured, employs clear and correct scholarly language, avoids ambiguity, includes clearly readable figures and tables, and is formatted according to the template specifications.

How to Submit

All submissions must conform to the ICSE 2026 formatting and submission instructions available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for both LaTeX and Word users. LaTeX users must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble of the document (i.e., \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}). The review option adds line numbers, thereby allowing referees to refer to specific lines in their comments.

• By submitting to the ICSE SEET 2026 Track, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. In particular, papers submitted to ICSE SEET 2026 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICSE SEET 2026. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious scientific misconduct, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases. To check for double submission and plagiarism issues, the chairs reserve the right to (1) share the list of submissions with the PC Chairs of other conferences with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software, under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.

• By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

• Please ensure that you and your co-authors use an ORCID ID throughout the publication process to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization.

• ICSE SEET 2026 will employ a double-anonymous review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities in the paper nor in the artifacts, code, videos, tools, documentation, or repositories associated with the submission. The authors must make every reasonable effort to honor the double-anonymous review process. In particular:

• Authors’ names must be omitted from the submission.

• All references to the author’s prior work should be in the third person.

• While authors have the right to upload preprints on ArXiV or similar sites, they should avoid specifying that the manuscript was submitted to ICSE SEET 2026.

• During review, authors should not publicly use the submission title.

• Disclosed artifacts (e.g. online material or replication packages) should also be anonymous throughout the time of the review process.

• Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process can be found on the ICSE 2026 Q&A page.

• By submitting to the ICSE SEET 2026 Track, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM, and the authorship policy of the IEEE.

Submissions to the ICSE SEET 2026 Track that meet the above requirements can be made via the submission site (https://icse2026-seet.hotcrp.com) by the submission deadline. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk rejected without further review.

We encourage the authors to upload their paper info early (and can submit the PDF later) to properly enter conflicts for double-anonymous reviewing. Authors are encouraged to try out the SIGSOFT Submission Checker to detect violations to the formatting and double anonymous guidelines. (Mind that the tool is based on heuristics. Therefore it may miss violations, and it can raise false alarms. The requirements listed in this call for papers take precedence over the results of the tool when deciding whether a paper meets the submission guidelines.)

Important Dates

• SEET Submissions Deadline: September 29, 2025

• SEET Acceptance Notification: December 1, 2025

• SEET Camera Ready: December 29, 2025

Conference Attendance Expectation

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for and attend the ICSE conference and present the paper. The presentation is expected to be delivered in person.

Contacts

For more information, please contact the ICSE SEET 2026 Co-Chairs:

• Tayana Conte

• Daniel Mendez