Open Access

The exponential growth in knowledge coupled with the decreasing knowledge half-life creates a challenging situation for educational programs - particularly those preparing software engineers for their very dynamic high-technology field. Teachers in high technology education areas are challenged in selecting and making relevant knowledge intuitively accessible to students, especially with regard the highly dynamic digital and software technologies. This paper contributes a knowledge nexus-based multimedia approach aligned with Higher Education 4.0 for creating learning apps on mobile devices that support multiple didactic models, leverage intrinsic curiosity and motivation, support gamification, and enable digital collaboration. Object recognition is used to trigger learning paths, and various didactic methods are supported via workflow-like learning flows to support group or team-based learning. A prototype app was realized to demonstrate its feasibility and an empirical evaluation in software engineering shows the didactic potential and advantages of the approach, which can be readily generalized and applied to the arts, sciences, etc.