The employment of blockchain technology in electronic voting (e-voting) systems is attracting significant attention due to its ability to enhance transparency, security, and integrity in digital voting. This study presents an extensive review of the existing research on e-voting systems that rely on blockchain technology. The study investigates a range of key research concerns, including the benefits, challenges, and impacts of such systems, together with technologies and implementations, and an identification of future directions of research in this domain. We use a hybrid review approach, applying systematic literature review principles to select and categorize scientific papers and reviewing the technology used in these in terms of the above key concerns. In the 252 selected papers, aspects such as security, transparency, and decentralization are frequently emphasized as the main benefits. In contrast, although aspects like privacy, verifiability, efficiency, trustworthiness, and auditability receive significant attention, they are not the primary focus. We observed a relative lack of emphasis on aspects such as accessibility, compatibility, availability, and usability in the reviewed literature. These aspects, although acknowledged, are not as thoroughly discussed as the aforementioned key benefits in the proposed solutions for blockchain-based e-voting systems, whereas the considered studies have proposed well-structured solutions for blockchain-based e-voting systems focusing on how blockchain can strengthen security, transparency, and privacy, in particular, the crucial aspect of scalability needs attention.

Fog and edge architectures provide a link between centralised clouds and the world of IoT and sensors. The architectures consist of devices of different sizes that coordinate the communication with sensors and cloud services, and that process data from or for the sensors and the cloud locally. In dynamic settings that allow resources to be created, placed, used and removed at any time, advanced orchestration techniques are needed for the activities. Often, these architectures cross organisational boundaries, which causes trust concerns. The origin of data and the identity of sensors or actuators needs to be identified. Additionally, data needs to be stored securely. Orchestration activities across boundaries are subject to a contractual perspective. We present here an architecture pattern that supports trusted orchestration for edge clouds. The W3C Provenance standard is the conceptual foundation of the pattern. Permissioned blockchain technology serves as the platform to implement the provenance framework.

Computational Thinking (CT) has been recognized as one of the fundamental skills that all graduates should acquire. For this reason, motivational concerns need to be addressed at an early age of a child, and reaching students who do not consider themselves candidates for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines is important as well if the broadest audience possible is to be engaged. This article describes a framework for teaching and assessing CT in the context of K-12 education. The framework is based on Agile software engineering methods, which rely on a set of principles and practices that can be mapped to the activities of CT. The article presents as well the results of an experiment applying this framework in two sixth-grade classes, with 42 participants in total. The results show that Agile software engineering methods are effective at teaching CT in middle schools, after the addition of some tasks to allow students to explore, project, and experience the potential product before using the software tools at hand. Moreover, according to the teachers’ feedback, the students reached all the educational objectives of the topics involved in the multidisciplinary activities. This result can be taken as an indicator that it is possible to use computing as a medium for teaching other subjects, besides computer science.