APCOMTEC has been promoting a Summer School since 2019. This year, Alexandra Albuquerque had the opportunity to promote the Summer School as an Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Program.

And thus ISCAP offered the BIP Introduction to Technical Communication, as a Summer School between 1 and 5-July, with a preliminary online session at 26-June. The Summer School drew 25 students, mostly from Italy, Latvia and Romania, with the addition of 3 Portuguese students.

The Summer School has followed roughly the same format with the same teachers. This year we had the following:

1. João Ribeiro motivated the students to the problems addressed by Technical Communication. During the practice, students struggled to craft their first clear and precise procedure.
2. Nicholas Hill introduced user-task analysis as an example of the mental tools used to plan larger bodies of effective documentation. During the practice, students created a user-task analysis grid.
3. Joaquim Baptista illustrated the wilder side of Technical Communication with comics. During the practice, students explained product features with comic strips, with smiles and laughter.
4. Pia Karasjärvi introduced accessibility concerns, including a very practical browser extension to validate websites. During the practice, students discovered all sorts of limitations in the websites of their own institutions.
5. For the final project, Alexandra, Nick, Pia, and Joaquim guided students to expand on what they had just learned, by exploring the complexity of student exchange programs. The project proved to be challenging for the time available, but intermediate milestones imposed a pace, and the six groups of students ended up addressing the challenge in different and complementary ways.

We had never had so many students at the Summer School. Usually we get less than a dozen. But our past fostered trust among teachers and maturity to the whole approach. We were ready for more students. In fact, I believe we could have accommodated more Portuguese students, because the practice would have scaled further.

Students present their comics to peers.

It would be natural to assume that International students would come to Porto just for the tourism and social part. But not these students: they truly engaged with each class and with the final project.

On the other hand, the social part was undeniable, with an enriching mix of ethnic backgrounds blending during:

• Shared lunches and 30-minute coffee breaks
• The social afternoon in Gaia featuring a guided visit to the wine caves and a boat tour of the six bridges of Porto.
• Free evenings after 5pm, as teachers set milestones for each day that would made later work spurious.
• The final dinner in Gaia where students enjoyed Portuguese delicacies such as crab, shrimp, "francesinha", marinated pork, and gizzard.

It was during the final dinner that I happened to sit down next to Karkus Santus, a student from Cape Verde studying network security at Felgueiras. Karlus will not be pursuing a career in Technical Communication, at least not right now, although he sees the value for the numerous reports he has to produce in his course.

Karlus eventually confided that the available public transportation from Felgueiras forced him to get up at 5am during the whole week. Yet, he still saw the whole week as worthwhile. Karlus made my day.

I can think of no higher praise for this Summer School.