SHARP on the ISLAND

75 researchers from educational science, computer science, and discipline-based education research (including biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and medical education) and psychology, came together on a small island in Bavaria for three days to plan, discuss, reflect, co-construct, and build a strong research community around personalizing simulation-based learning in higher education.

With 40 postdocs and PhD students and 35 professors, the CRC 419 SHARP came together at LMU Academy at Frauenchiemsee Island for our yearly retreat. We started with a series of poster session that gave us an overview of where we stand in the 24 projects, and continued with a plenary in which our guests Katja Scharenberg, Janine Grütter, and Peter Edelsbrunner shared impressions, reflections, and possible future developments—including the suggestion to complement our series of experimental cross-sectional studies with a stronger longitudinal perspective.

In the General Assembly and a scientific board meeting, we welcomed 15 new SHARP members and agreed on a shared set of variables and instruments for joint data collection across SHARP projects—an important step toward cumulative evidence.

Beyond the plenary sessions, more than 25 smaller meetings focusing on specific collaborations took place, e.g., on developing a joint scale to measure collaborative problem solving, on finetuning a large foundation model for adaptive scaffolding using existing learning process data, or on operationalisations of constructs like the "salience of cues". Workshops on designing adaptive scaffolding and feedback, research data management, on AI infrastructure, on open science practices, on science communication, and transfer took place.

The retreat created momentum beyond individual work packages: new cross-cutting working groups started to form, strategic conversations took place on the shared priorities for joint research in the coming month.

SHARP is a Collaborative Research Center funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - German Research Foundation from Technische Universität München, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Universität Augsburg, and LRZ.