Building Europe’s quantum technology education community

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the development of the European field of Quantum Technology education, by drawing on the framework of activity theory (AT), most frequently employed in the social sciences. Focusing on the QTEdu CSA, an impactful European project intended to unite stakeholders in QT education, we study the evolution of 11 pilot projects, cross-cutting education for members of the public, high schools, universities, and industry. The pilots are modelled as activities, drawing on data from 402 online profiles, 33 written reports, and 13 interviews conducted with pilot coordinators and members. Through identifying their elements in the language of activity theory, we examine the structure of the community, and the interactions between the individuals, which may have contributed to the development of QT education in Europe. To do so, we use activity theoretic concepts such as contradiction and expansive learning, offering a practical explanation for using AT to model communities, such that it may benefit future research studying community-based transformations in STEM education.

1 Introduction

With the rapid development of Quantum Technology (QT), and billions of euros investments worldwide [1], nations of the world are in danger of outgrowing their industry capacity. In the short term, there is a need for a trained workforce capable of taking up employment in the emerging quantum industry and those sectors supported by QTs, such as healthcare, finance, transportation, and communications [2]. In the longer term, a quantum-aware society is needed which is accepting and open to the substantial impacts it may have on our daily lives [3], without fear or misinformation [4]. Many nations worldwide understand the importance of education toward a workforce for QT, acknowledging this need in their national strategies. Education and workforce development are explicitly mentioned in the government publications of Ireland, Denmark, South Korea, Australia, Sweden, EU, France, UK, Canada, US, South Africa, Thailand, Japan, Switzerland, Russia, India, Netherlands, Slovakia, Germany, and Israel [5–25].

In South Africa [12], the national strategy emphasises the need for program development and implementation at the Bachelor and Master’s level “by the community for the community.” for example proposing a shared curriculum-based bachelor program utilising many universities, and specialist master’s programs [12]. A similarly designed national program utilising shared teaching resources exist in the USA (QUSTEAM, [26]), the EU (DigiQ, [27, 28]) and in Japan (QAcademy) [29]. Some nations emphasise the need for public awareness of quantum technologies, such as the USA where they believe that “outreach to a broader audience will be essential” [30]. In Thailand, the national strategy highlights the importance of ensuring that the public do not develop misunderstanding or anxiety about the emerging technology [31]. Others consider the need to expand the pool of PhD students available, by increasing the number of permanent faculty able to support them [32], or creating more funded doctoral courses [21, 23, 33].

It is evident that there is a large multiplicity of possible approaches to workforce development, and that it represents a challenge without a simple solution. After all, “what are the best strategies for training a new generation in a rapidly developing technology?” is not a question with a clear answer. Over time, QT has increasingly been moving from the domain of Physicists, out to that of Engineers, Information Sciences, and those in industry [34, 35]. Therefore, the target audience and intended learning outcomes of QT education have also shifted over time [36] and continue to do so. How best to teach Quantum Technologies in this context is therefore a substantial research question, one which can be best tackled by an active research community. In established areas of STEM with a longer history of teaching, such as Physics and Chemistry, there exist communities of discipline-based education research (DBER), [37, 38] which have been instrumental in changing paradigms of teaching over the past several decades, such as the now-widespread use of research-based tools for identifying misconceptions [39], and steps taken towards greater diversity in the STEM classroom [40]. Quantum Technology needs its own DBER community. This has been the strategy of the EU in launching the project “QTEdu CSA” [41].

1.1 The QTEdu CSA

The goal of the QTEdu project was to unite disparate stakeholders from industry, academia, education practitioners, and education researchers, building up the world’s first DBER community for Quantum Technology, one that could work to tackle the question of what exactly should be the strategy for supporting Europe’s Quantum workforce development. QTEdu was a CSA (coordination and support action), meaning that it was not intended to produce primary research, but rather to coordinate an effort to provide a bottom-up input into Europe’s QT education strategy, so that future funding in the field would best reflect the needs of the community. Over the course of the last three years since its inception, there is no doubt that QTEdu has had a significant impact on the state of education in Europe.

One simple measure of this is the publication record of its members (Fig. 1), which has substantially increased since the inception of the community in 2020, as measured from the google scholar profiles of 259 members We note that this may represent a slight under-estimate, as 143 members do not have google scholar profiles (36%), but the trend is indicative of the impact of the community. Indeed, this very journal issue [42] may trace its origins back towards QTEdu, and several of the articles published within at the time of writing record research carried out in its context [28, 43].

Figure 1

The total number of publications related to QT Education in academic journals, conferences, and books, measured by google scholar, authored by community members over time. The trend shows an increase since the start of the QTEdu CSA

With respect to funding, QTEdu has also influenced this significantly, by paving the way for the Digital Europe Programme to fund [44] large collaborative projects in DigiQ and QTIndu. DigiQ addresses the development of Quantum Technology specialised Master’s degree programs (CITE https://digiq.eu), and QTIndu addresses the development of industry-focused courses in QT [45]. As the community continues to evolve, it is likely that these, and future projects in the Digital Europe Programme, shape its future (see Fig. 2.) In this article, we will chart the evolution of the community to date using a novel theoretical lens - activity theory, and reflect on the role of community building in the growth of the Quantum Technology industry.

Figure 2

Europe’s Quantum Technology Education community, as it arose since the Quantum Manifesto in 2016. The manifesto led to the launch of the Quantum Flagship in 2020, from which the QTEdu CSA was developed to build the QT Education community in Europe

1.2 Structuring the QTEdu community

The QTEdu community was, by design, highly structured into five working groups, representing the interests of the members. These are namely: WG1 High School and Outreach, WG2 Higher Education, WG3 Lifelong learning and (re-)training, WG4 Educational Research, WG5 Equity and Inclusion. In order to populate them, calls went out through online channels, and information was disseminated at several Quantum Technology events and conferences. An online submission form was set up in which potential members were required to submit profile information, including fields such as “topic of work”, “education and outreach programs/initiatives involved in”, “materials/competences I am willing to share/codevelop”. Responses were provided using a mixture of full sentences, bullet points, and individual words/phrases. These one-slide profiles encouraged the applicants to think about their reasons for participating in the community, and made them transparently available to other members in order to facilitate collaborations.

All members were invited to the first meetings of the working groups, held in March 2021. In these meetings, discussions were structured using an online whiteboard software to elicit interaction between participants and to encourage them to share ideas and interests. An indicative example, from WG1: High School and Outreach is shown below (Fig. 3.), whereby participants were given the opportunity to stick notes onto the board with their ideas and thoughts, whilst the coordinators and other participants could read and discuss them. Discussion points comprised the following:

• 1. 1: “What is missing? Goals for Future activities in the area of school/outreach”

• 2. 2: “Identify structural challenges for education/training scale-up in the area of School/Outreach.”

• 3. 3: “National, European, and international funding initiatives you know of in the area of School/Outreach”

• 4. 4: “Competence Framework feedback and discussion”

• 5. 5: “Coffee break: contact and exchange”

• 6. 6: “Question and Answer”

Figure 3

A snapshot example of how community input was taken during the QTEdu Working Group Meetings, March 2021. Sticky notes were used to promote active participation, collect feedback on discussion points, and facilitate networking. The degree of interaction between members was substantial, demonstrated by the number of sticky notes placed

194 individual members participated in the working group kick-off meetings, for a total of 322 participations when counting those who attended multiple meetings (see Table 1). It is immediately interesting to note that the working group with the greatest interest was WG1: High School and Outreach.

Table 1 Number of participants and quantity of sticky notes left during each working group kickoff meeting. A total of 1025 sticky notes were left over the 5 meetings demonstrating a high degree of activity.

1.3 The QTEDU pilots

The Pilots were structured and launched in the following manner. In the first months of 2021, the QTEdu community was launched and calls for signups were circulated via the website of the Quantum Flagship (and some email list?). Community members registered to one or more of five working groups in topical areas, namely WG1 High School and Outreach, WG2 Higher Education, WG3 Lifelong learning and (re-)training, WG4 Educational Research, WG5 Equity and Inclusion. In March 2021, each working group held a meeting which were used for community brainstorming in specific operational pilots they could use to address goals. The 11 pilots were then formed, serving as the passion projects of the community to improve the status of QT education in Europe. Pilots spanned all of WG1-WG4, while WG5 was considered a transversal pillar in which principles affecting all of the community were discussed, without hosting any pilots specific to WG5.

The pilots were organised specifically to maximise their generation of useful recommendations for the EU QT education strategy. For this reason, they were required to submit an application document, midterm report, and final report. These documents served as a data source for challenges facing Europe’s quantum workforce development in different areas of the pipeline. A partner agreement document was prepared and signed by all members, which stipulated the operational requirements of the partners involved.

The pilots and the community also served as a platform for development and testing of the Competence Framework for Quantum Technologies [46], intended to serve as a common language for smooth communication between academia and industry. The Competence Framework details 8 QT topic areas, spanning basics of Quantum Mechanics, to the Quantum Flagship’s 4 pillars of QT [47], and valorisation - transferring scientific insights to societal value. The QTEdu community was intended to test the framework for applications in QT education, such as for detailing the learning outcomes of curricula, or for constructing job educational requirements. Several rounds of feedback were provided by the community for the framework, and it served as a tool which many of the pilots used as part of their operation.

Many of the pilots were successful by academic measures: producing research articles, conference presentations, and even leading to several large grants. In this article, we employ a novel research methodology inspired from the social sciences, in order to evaluate the pilot-based community model, employing the language of Activity Theory. We also reflect on the current state of Europe’s QT Education landscape, and identify the impact of the community in developing it to where it is now, through the following central research question:

RQ: What observable changes in the European quantum education landscape can be attributed to the activities and interactions of the QTEdu community, as interpreted through Activity Theory?

To do so, we will draw on a mixed corpus of qualitative data from interviews, documents, and online information, in order to identify the activity-theoretic elements of the 11 pilots, providing a structural language through which we can understand them. With information from this dataset, we can examine how their interactions, in particular the contradictions between them, may shed some light on the development of the community. In addition, we also intend for this article to provide a practical and understandable resource for practitioners in STEM education fields to use Activity Theory as a modelling tool. For this reason, in Sect. 2 we provide a simple breakdown of this theoretical framework such that it can be easily applied elsewhere by practitioners wishing to understand the impact of community-led initiatives.

2 Theoretical framework - activity theory

In this section we summarise Activity Theory (AT), the theoretical framework underpinning this research and several decades of work in diverse fields from sociology [48], education [49], medicine [50], and many others besides. We emphasise that this is a brief and direct summary intended to provide a clear understanding of how the theory works in a practical manner. For full detail on the development and many applications of AT, we refer the reader to the reference numbered [48].

2.1 The activity system

Activity theory (AT) is a framework for modelling changes in a social setting [51, 52]. The unit of analysis it investigates is the Activity System, which defines activity as collective, intentional efforts to drive change. The activity system is built on the actions of individuals, underpinned by the operations which enable them to be carried out. A defining characteristic of the activity system is that it is directed towards a particular objective, which is defined by an object (something which is to be influenced by the activity), an outcome (an intended end point of the activity), and a motivation (a reason for working toward an outcome).

Activity theory provides an analytical lens by breaking down the activity into elements which can be identified for any given activity system. These comprise tools (the items and systems used to accomplish the activity), subjects (the people who carry out the activity), rules (the laws, conventions, or otherwise underpinning agreements that shape how the activity can be carried out), community (the people who affect the activity or are affected by it, but do not directly carry out the actions within it), and a division of labour (the manner in which work is organised in the activity). The elements of the activity system are summarised below in Fig. 4.

Figure 4

The Activity system as it may be used to model the QTEdu community. An activity system, defined by an object and desired outcome, consists of elements which define a unique system. These elements are Rules, Community, Division of Labour, Subjects, and Tools

2.2 Modelling community with activity theory

One can use the activity system as described to characterise any activity, but the most invaluable benefit of AT is that as activities are, by definition, efforts towards change, AT can naturally model dynamics. One of the core features of AT is the concept of contradiction. Contradictions can be considered difficulties or issues which must be overcome through the course of the activities. Yrjo Engeström, one of the founders of AT, argues that ultimately the productive change that activities represent are driven by contradictions [48], modelled through four levels:

Primary Contradictions are those within the same category of element in the system. For example, two rules may be conflicting and impede the progress of the activity. In order for the activity to progress, one or more of the rules, subjects, or any other element, may have to change.

Secondary Contradictions are those between elements of the same activity system. For example, it is possible that the division of labour may contradict the rules of the activity. As in the primary case, one of these elements may therefore change to direct the activity towards a productive outcome.

Tertiary Contradictions tend to arise sequentially following secondary ones. In overcoming a challenge associated with a secondary contradiction, there are changes to one or more of the elements of the system. In some cases, it is possible that this leads to a change in the object of the activity. One common way this occurs is through the subjects and/or division of labour shifting, bringing in new people and new ideas, and potentially a new possible goal and direction for the work being carried out. The tertiary contradiction is then between the existing activity and the new directionally-advanced formulation of the same activity [53], leading to a contradiction which may be resolved by further changes to other elements of the activity in order to support the new object.

Quaternary Contradictions are those experienced between the elements of neighbouring activity systems. They are particularly prominent when the systems partially or entirely share an object, when they therefore represent different approaches to a particular goal. They can lead to significant changes such as activities combining efforts, or changing their objects accordingly.

Whilst any level of contradiction can occur individually, scholars note that many of the most significant changes in activity are driven by a sequential process of contradictions beginning with the primary or secondary, leading to a change in the object of the activity, and on occasions one or more activities combining or beginning anew. This process is termed expansive learning [54]. In this article, we will apply AT and in particular the concept of contradiction to several of the activities in the Quantum Technology Education community. In doing so, we attempt to answer our central research question, and uncover interactions between and within activities which may have led to observable changes in the community.

3 Methodology

The QTEdu community is ideally suited to activity-theoretic analysis due to the highly structured nature of the activities therein. In order to use AT, one has to select a unit of analysis - what is meant by an activity. We could choose to develop the model in any of the following ways:

• a) The community as a single activity with the object of advancing Quantum Technology Education in Europe.

• b) The 5 working groups as 5 individual activities with the object of advancing the state of Quantum Technology Education in their focus area (e.g school and outreach, higher education, etc)

• c) The pilot projects as 11 individual activities each with their own objects, but perhaps interacting over the course of their year-long durations.

In this research, we chose the pilots as the most natural unit of analysis, as they have well-defined rules, tools, subjects, and other elements. In addition, as the most fine-grained level of analysis, they offer the richest source of information on community dynamics. However, we note that it may be equally valid to choose a different analysis unit, as previous research using activity theory has focused on levels from the individual to the collective [55].

3.1 Data acquisition

Data acquisition drew on a rich corpus of qualitative and quantitative data generated by the QTEdu community over the course of March 2021 - September 2022, during the formation and operation of the pilot projects. First, the 402 community member profiles were investigated in order to contextualise the goals and expectations of the community. We refer to this as “profiling the community”, as it is important to understand the profile of the dataset in order to use qualitative data analytic techniques. Subsequently a variant of reflexive thematic analysis [56, 57] was used to investigate the application documents, mid-term reports, and final reports of the 11 pilot projects, a total of 33 documents. In addition, following the conclusion of the pilot’s formal period of operation, 13 interviews were conducted with members of the QTEdu community, primarily consisting of the coordinators of the pilot projects and several other of the most active members. Interviews followed a semi-structured rubric which was adapted for the individual context of each of the 11 pilots, which the researchers were aware of from the 3 reports available for each pilot. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. The transcripts were used to identify the elements of the pilots in activity theory, alongside other relevant codes which helped to understand how they interacted (see Sect. 3.3). Whilst the pilot reports and interviews served as the primary data sources for constructing the activity systems of the pilots, we also made use of the information provided by community members upon signing up to the community, and the discussions recorded on the virtual whiteboards of the working groups (as described in Sect. 1.2).

It is important to acknowledge that this research is interpretive in nature, and therefore influenced by the positionality of the researchers. Two of the researchers were part of the organising team of the QTEdu project, and therefore had a continuous overview of the community and were able to contextualise findings from the data sources. However, the involvement of the researchers in the QTEdu necessitated taking a reflexive [56–58] approach to analysis, in which the participating researchers carefully monitored and discussed their findings in the context of their role within the project, in order to identify any possible biases [58].

3.2 Profiling the community

In order to orient the activity-theoretic analysis, it is helpful for the researcher to have an indication of the motivations, and experiences of the community members [59], what we refer to as the profile of the community. This enabled us to contextualise the data generated from pilot reports and interviews, which we consider an important step in constructing the pilot activity systems. To obtain this community profile, we used responses submitted by the participants in their initial one-slide applications. A total of 402 unique slides were analysed. We conducted a simple word frequency analysis by extracting text responses from three fields.

i) “Materials/Competences I am willing to share/co-develop:”

ii) “Resources I am looking for:”

iii) “What kind of collaborations/synergies am I looking for?”

Responses were provided using a mixture of full sentences, bullet points, and individual words/phrases, from which frequent words were drawn. Findings from the preliminary analysis are shown in Sect. 4.1.

3.3 Qualitative data analysis

The primary data sources used to construct the activity systems were the three pilot reports, namely the initial application, midterm, and final reports, which covered a total duration of one year (33 documents total.) In the initial round of coding, these were qualitatively tagged to identify Tools, Rules, Object, Outcomes, Division of Labour, Subjects, Community. A second layer of codes identified dynamics, namely Major Change, Challenges, Contradictions. The complete list of codes and their frequency across the reports is available in Appendix 2. The coded documents were used to construct initial, draft Activity Systems for the pilots.

Following this initial stage of analysis, 13 interviews were conducted with the QTEdu pilot coordinators (8) and other prominently active members of the pilots (5). The interview transcripts were coded firstly to identify elements of the activity systems and i) how they evolved over time, ii) how they interacted with the other pilots and the wider community, such as process, change in activity, Collaboration (internal to pilot), Collaboration (wider community). Furthermore, a second round of coding identified thematic codes common to discussions in the pilots, such as funding, decision-making, conference/meeting. A total of 23 codes were used in the pilot interview transcripts, available in Appendix 3. Subsequently each pilot’s initial draft activity system was re-examined in light of the coded interviews, leading to refinement of the activity systems, such as inclusion of additional aspects of each element, e.g a tool which was mentioned in the interviews but not in the reports. The final versions are presented in Appendix 3, and enabled us to examine the community in terms of how the activities evolved over time, how they interacted, and what were major contradictions.

4 Results and discussion

In this section we demonstrate how AT has been used to model the QTEdu community, indicative of its feasibility as a practical tool for research into community dynamics (RQ1), and discuss the evolution of the state of the QT Education field as understood through AT (RQ2).

4.1 Profiling the community

Here we highlight the key intentions of the members of the community in participating in the QTEdu pilots, which can inform the development of the activity systems. Below are the most frequently highlighted keywords (Table 2). For keywords which have synonymous meaning, for example “teach” and “teaching”, or “collaboration” and “collaborations”, we have combined these frequencies to prevent double counting. We have also excluded certain terms which are already implied by the context of the survey, such as “quantum”.

Table 2 Most frequent keywords provided by community members in response to introductory questions, showing number of occurrences

With regard i), “Materials/Competences I am willing to share/co-develop:”, one interesting outcome is the prevalence of Physics, demonstrating the context of QT education, as of now, still primarily based in Physics programs and departments. We also note that Outreach, School, and High School, are commonly referred to, corroborating the interest of the community in QT education for the younger generations and the general public.

With regard ii) “Resources I am looking for:”, In the language of activity theory, materials are in fact themselves tools - physical or digital objects in which members of the community use to carry out their activities. With this in mind, we note that a substantial fraction of the resources community members require are tools or collaborators to develop teaching materials.

With regard iii), “What kind of collaborations/synergies am I looking for?”, we note that the most frequent word is collaboration(s), and the areas in which the community members are looking to collaborate are primarily in Research and Development of materials and activities. These are the kind of undertaking that are difficult to do alone, and demonstrate one of the key benefits of being part of the community.

4.2 The structure of the community

With an understanding of the goals and motivations of the community members as a whole, and using the coded pilot reports and community interviews, we were able to generate activity systems for the pilot structure in the QTEdu community. These activity systems for all pilots are available in Appendix 3. Names of individuals have been removed to preserve their anonymity. In most cases, the working groups in which the pilots were built from defined the object of the activity.

Given the pilots as activity systems, we are now in a position to identify interactions between and within the elements of the 11 activity systems. By doing so, we are able to infer some of the community dynamics which may have resulted from these interactions. It is important to note that this analysis is not exhaustive, and it cannot map out every interaction which occurred among the 11 pilots due to limitations of the dataset. Rather, it is intended to highlight the major changes which occurred and the mechanism in the language of activity theory: contradiction. These major changes, we could consider expansive learning [54], and lead to the dynamics of the community.

4.2.1 Tertiary education - the trajectory of the Master’s pilots

The pilot projects in tertiary education, the Quantum Technology Open Master (QTOM), and Empowering the Future Experts in Quantum Technology (EFEQT) [60], were both focused on exploring novel ways of bringing QT competences to Master’s students.

One of the most important impactful outcomes of the community, and specifically the working group in higher education, was the arising of DigiQ, a pan-European program that aims to transform the educational ecosystem in Quantum Technology (QT). By introducing innovative teaching methods and a multinational program structure, the project intended to scale up and enhance quantum education across the European Higher Education Area. This involves upgrading existing QT Master programs, developing new programs, and providing a bridging program to align non-specialist degrees with the needs of the QT workforce. It is supported by 24 partners in 10 different countries.

In order to understand how DigiQ arose from the community, we consider the activity-theoretic evolution of the two pilots with a shared object space in Master’s-level higher education: the QTEdu Open Master (QTOM), and Empowering the Future Experts in Quantum Technology (EFEQT). These pilots shared the same goal: equipping more Master’s graduates with the skills needed to constitute the quantum workforce, either by progressing directly into industry, or through a PhD. They shared an overlapping community of Master’s students benefiting from their actions, and of staff (pilot participants) involved as subjects in offering students access to them. However, the approach they took toward the object was rather different. QTOM set up an open online platform for the sharing of QT courses across institutions, while EFEQT set up a closed, structured certificate to augment the studies of master students. The approaches were in many ways rather contrasting, with substantially different rules and tools (see the Appendix for complete list).

Both of these pilots served as key aids in order to observe and understand the issues that such a pan-European initiative could be presented with. More specifically, EFEQT was faced with the contradiction that even though, as a rule, courses should be shared with a set schedule, that proved difficult in practice, due to the differing semester times and schedules of the programs involved - a primary contradiction in the rules of the pilot. Additionally, there were accreditation issues with the local universities, something that was also observed in QTOM, where difficulties were encountered in the efforts of having the degree accredited by the minister of education. Furthermore, QTOM was faced with the issues of bigger universities having more obstructive systems, differences in the evaluation between graded and non-graded courses, an under-recognition of Quantum Technologies around Europe and the under-evaluation of internships and industry experience. Most of these issues were taken into consideration when developing DigiQ and ways were found to overcome them.

“I would say for the pilot, we wanted to see what are the difficulties associated to sharing these courses. We wanted to run an experiment. When it comes to DigiQ, now we are using some of what we learned”. -Participant to one of the Master pilots

With the influence of an external factor in the community, namely the EU’s Digital Europe funding program, the pilots’ shared object, yet distinct rules and tools became a quaternary contradiction. How could their approach be adopted for funding, when they presented so differently? The activity-theoretic description of the resolution of quaternary contradictions is termed expansive learning, wherein the activities significantly reshaped in order to relive the contradiction. In the case of the WG2 pilots, they pooled ideas and subjects in order to birth the project DigiQ [27], where the Open Master model [61], outcome of QTOM) serves as the core model of course sharing, and the EFEQT certificate (outcome of EFEQT) is the template of the four student networks in the project. Some of the Activity-theoretic elements are also unique to DigiQ, such as the work package structure defined by the type of grant, while others draw from both of the pilots, such as the subjects and community. We visualise the expansive learning below in Fig. 5.

Figure 5

The pilot projects in higher education, QTOM and EFEQT. Over the course of the QTEdu duration, the activities went through a phase of expansive learning driven by a shared object but contradictions in elements such as in tools and community. Driven by these issues to overcome, the pilots formed a new activity in the Digital Europe project DigiQ

4.2.2 The high school pilots: shifting goals and subject-community fluidity

The High school and outreach pilots are also an interesting case study, as they highlight how objects can shift over the course of an activity. As a community, no one activity system exists in isolation. This is visualised in Fig. 6, where is shown that, particularly in the WG1 pilots, there was much overlapping in their objects, community, tools, and subjects. Through the course of the pilots, there was a back-and-forth flux of individuals contributing further to the pilots, or reducing their efforts, for example due to a lack of time, or due to interests aligning greater with one pilot than another. The coordinator of one of the high school pilots described how they “pulled in” a member of another, as their research was well aligned, leading to the member bringing in additional tools which shifted the object of the pilot.

Figure 6

The QTEdu community, modelled as a set of interacting activity systems based in 4 working groups around School Education and Outreach, Higher Education, Lifelong Learning, and Education research. Some of the pilots overlap with shared objects or activity elements, leading to them interacting for the benefit of the community as a whole. Note that working group 5, equity and inclusion, did not host any pilots but rather acted as a transversal discussion group

“A PhD student from XXX came later in the group, and he brought with him some literature about why to do quantum physics, so we added a lot of content about this. In the end it shaped the direction more than we expected. Meanwhile XXX was there initially, but he didn’t have so much time, he is also teaching. Because of that, maybe we included less didactics than we otherwise would have.”-Coordinator of one of the High School Pilots

While individuals reducing effort could be negative for the operation of the activity, for the most part this fluidity is valuable for the community as a whole, as people bring with them ideas, tools, and may even induce or overcome contradictions in the system, leading to expansive learning. They also may change the division of labour or even the object, as in the QUTE4E pilot, where the initial object (producing a comprehensive “hypersyllabus” of quantum education concepts and approaches for the public and young people), was refined over time to the “production of theoretical and practical guidelines for quantum technology outreach” through the interests of its members. This movement of effort between subjects and community, we call subject-community fluidity, and it represents a key feature of community that we believe can be well captured by AT.

5 Concluding thoughts

In this article we have charted the course of the Quantum Technology education community in Europe. Through employing activity theory, we have been able to investigate the structure of the community. We identified how interactions between the pilots, such as contradictions in the case of the higher education pilots, and subject-community fluidity in the case of the high school ones, led to changes in the activity-theoretic elements of the pilots and ultimately to more successful activities. We note here that our use of activity theory is far from exhaustive, as one could investigate the community at different levels of detail from the individual to the collective, and still elucidate more dynamics. While this is beyond the scope of this article, our intention is to highlight the value of this theory, and social sciences frameworks more broadly, in understanding how people interact and give rise to changes, in the highly specialised and technical fields of QT. As presented, the theory and modelling process is in fact domain-agnostic and could equally be applied in other high-technology fields such as Artificial Intelligence or Data Science.

Furthermore, this article serves as a reference point for the project which has helped to build the QT education community: the QTEdu CSA [41]. QTEdu has undoubtedly had a significant impact on the status of the QT education research community in Europe, as can be seen in both academic sphere with many publications and presentations, the worldwide community portal, this very special issue, and the large ongoing European projects which now serve as a major upscaling of Master’s and industry training. Much of the success can likely be attributed to the pilot structure, enabling activities in the community to be structured and synergistic. Perhaps this system for community building may be of value to other nations worldwide, in helping to develop their quantum workforce.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 3 Table of Codes, Pilot Reports

Appendix 2

Table 4 Table of Codes, Interviews

Appendix 3: Pilots as Activity Systems

Table 5 QUTE4E

Table 6 QT5M

Table 7 QCI

Table 8 QTeMaS

Table 9 DQC-2stap

Table 10 PCK

Table 11 PHONQEE

Table 12 IQTM

Table 13 EFEQT

Table 14 QTOM

Table 15 QAREER