With increasing reliance on computing systems and the growing frequency of cybersecurity incidents, it is important for CS undergraduates to develop foundational security skills before entering professional roles. In particular, students should be able to recognize and reason about potential security vulnerabilities in software. However, existing approaches to integrating security into the CS curriculum often emphasize narrow areas such as secure coding or highly technical topics like cryptography or software security, rather than fostering a broader perception of security threats. In this paper, we examine how undergraduates conceptualize and identify security threats by analyzing how they attempt to find ''attacks'' in other students' code. We conducted a think-aloud study with 15 CS undergraduates at a US-based R1 institution who had no formal training in computer security. Participants analyzed peer-developed text-based video game implementations to identify potential vulnerabilities, drawing on their prior experience implementing a similar game in an earlier ''Build-It'' task. Our analysis shows that students employed systematic, hypothesis-driven strategies, including unit testing, edge-case exploration, and controlled experimentation, while also drawing on prior experiences both inside and outside the classroom. Although most students attempted to validate whether an attack was successful, several stopped after identifying a single vulnerability, leaving additional issues unexplored. Based on these findings, we offer recommendations for CS instructors and curriculum committees on integrating foundational security concepts into programming assignments to help students better recognize and reason about computer security threats.

In this paper, we propose a new metric – Joint Choice Time (JCT) – to measure how and when visitors are collaborating around an interactive museum exhibit. This extends dwell time, one of the most commonly used metrics for museum engagement – which tends to be individual, and sacrifices insight into activity and learning details for measurement simplicity. We provide an exemplar of measuring JCT using a common “diversity metric” for collaborative choices and potential outcomes. We provide an implementable description of the metric, results from using the metric with our own data, and potential implications for designing museum exhibits and easily measuring social engagement. Here, we apply JCT to an interactive exhibit game called “Rainbow Agents” where museum visitors can play independently or work together to tend to a virtual garden using computer science concepts. Our data showed that diversity of meaningful choices positively correlated with both dwell time and diversity of positive and creative outcomes. JCT - as a productive as well as easy to access measure of social work - provides an example for learning analytics practitioners and researchers (especially in museums) to consider centering social engagement and work as a rich space for easily assessing effective learning experiences for museum visitors.

Crowdsourced applications are plagued by participation inequality. Only a small number of individuals are responsible for the majority of contributions, while most are engaged at the periphery. Early efforts to understand participation inequality used a percentile approach and a single measure of engagement to describe participants, usually the number of activities completed. With the advent of increasingly sophisticated web analytics, methods for characterising patterns of participation have also become more sophisticated. More recent research uses multiple metrics and clustering algorithms to understand both intensity and duration of participation. We extend research on this topic by applying a model-based approach to analyse multiple metrics of participation. Specifically, we demonstrate the use of latent profile analysis to understand the underlying structure of crowdsourcer participation data from a citizen science project. We make comparisons between latent profile analysis and more traditional methods of characterising participation. We find that considering multiple metrics of engagement provides a more nuanced view of participation inequality, useful in generating both theoretical and applied research questions. We also find that a model-based approach offers several advantages over clustering algorithms including the ease with which results can be integrated in downstream analyses and the ability to report on model fit.

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread throughout the United States in Spring 2020, universities around the country conducted the unprecedented feat of moving essentially their entire curricula online. This abrupt mid-semester shift in modality was the first of its kind at scale, but it will not be the last. Now that our experiences during the pandemic have demonstrated that an online transition is possible, we may see similar transitions proposed during smaller scale crises, especially as an alternative to school closures. We present an experience report focusing on computer science instructors at a large Midwestern university during the Spring 2020 online transition: the challenges they faced, as well as the interventions they implemented. As more data and analysis is generated from the first mass, unwilling modality shift, it is nevertheless important to focus on the visceral reactions and lessons learned from teachers and students in the moment as they responded to an unprecedented situation. We therefore also present our analysis of critical challenges and preliminary pedagogical recommendations for consideration during future rapid transition "involuntarily online" semesters.

Pair programming in CS1 courses has been shown to have many benefits (both to students and instructors), and it is widely employed. Other than assignment by instructors, how do students select their partners, and what are their perceptions of working with a partner? In our study, students in a CS1 course for non-majors were required to complete a brief, anonymized survey after each homework assignment; we analyzed their survey responses over the course of the semester and compared the results of students who worked with a partner and students who worked alone. Pairs and individuals judged assignments to be about the same difficulty, but pairs spent less time on assignments. Individuals generally worked alone out of preference, but a minority of them reported interest in working with partners but could not find one on their own. Through our analysis we model relationships between survey constructs, student success, and student satisfaction.

This paper presents Connected Spaces (C-S) -- a tool designed to promote collaboration in makerspaces. It also describes a pilot study designed to test C-S's effectiveness in enabling people to seek help from peers. In our pilot, some (but not all) students were able to leverage C-S's affordances. We explore both supporting and mitigating factors, and highlight design features for environments as well as tools to support divergent, open-ended exploration and learning.

Forest Friends is a strategic video game designed to introduce elements of computer science in an engaging and accessible way. The game includes artificial intelligence coding components that encourage participants to work with conditional statements. The research goal is to place the game in an informal learning environment to study the impact that it can have on young learners from diverse backgrounds.

In this paper, we describe a tablet application designed around an interactive game-based science museum exhibit. It is aimed to help provide museum docents useful information about the visitors' actions, in a way that is actionable, and enables docents to provide assistance and prompts to visitors that are more meaningful, compared to what they are typically able to do without this interface augmentation.

While the USA struggles with a demand for computer programming education which exceeds the capacity of formal educational opportunities, online resources dedicated to programming are growing rapidly. One valuable way to measure the usefulness of these online resources is to examine the links posted in the forums of CS learning communities. We scraped and analyzed over 80,000 posts from two popular forums (Reddit and Stack Overflow), and found that how these communities use and talk about CS learning resources (such as books and tutorials) demonstrated their differing priorities. These results have much to suggest to both novices and teachers.

Interactive technologies like multi-touch tables enable museum exhibit designers to support visitors' learning with a wide range of resources (from multimedia to dynamic feedback to the presence of other visitors). Designers must decide, though, how best to align the affordances of these resources with the learning activities they are trying to support [23]. This work examines a multi-touch table exhibit designed to support an activity, tinkering, which has been identified as a form of interaction that may offer special benefits to novices learning about engineering [e.g., 4]. When a learner is tinkering, he or she is engaged in a process of iterative adjustment to a constructed artifact, making use of "just in time" resources and feedback to guide the next steps in their exploration of the problem space. The exhibit studied in this work provided several resources for supporting tinkering, and this paper presents a detailed case showing how these different resources (some technical, some social, and some sociotechnical) were or were not used by learners. A key design goal we identified was the need to transform the tacit engineering practices of visitors into visible engineering performances, such that those performances could serve as "cultural tools" [35] for mediating the learning of other visitors.

We describe the development and user testing of an iPad prototype for a new museumbased, interactive tabletop computer game called MakeScape Lite. The game lets learnerswho have no prior formal experience in circuitrybuild virtual circuits in a fantasy challenge scenario to (1) learn some basic circuitry concepts and (2) engage in basic engineering practices, such as problem identification, design, and iteration. In phase 1 of testing, we explored how children socially interacted to develop design goals when the game lacked explicit guidance about what to do. In phase 2, which we discuss here, we iterated the prototype with partially worked examples to offer more explicit guidance to children. We then studied video and game log data of students playtesting the game.

Studio K is a game design curriculum constructed to provide middle school students an engaging entry into computer science and programming. Developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the program employs Microsoft's 3D programming environment, Kodu, in tandem with support and analytic tools for facilitators, and an online community that provides players with a support system. These key features are bolstered with incorporation of telemetry data gathered through design sessions that are used to improve site functioning, curriculum relevancy, and administrative tools. This program is applied across contexts, with applications in formal classrooms, informal extracurricular clubs or camps, and alternative learning environments such as library systems or home schools. Studio K provides a well-supported, unique entry into computer science in which programming knowledge becomes a tool that supports learners' goals in designing and developing games.

This paper discusses two case studies of students observed in an introductory computer science (CS1) course. Observations reinforce notions of the potential benefits of culturally and personally relevant instruction in the computer science (CS) classroom and call into question the stigmatization of 'nerd' culture within the literature of CS education. As this study is qualitative and exploratory in nature, it does not provide definitive, statistically generalizable findings -- however, it does unearth nuanced and potentially beneficial pathways of investigation for CS educators and researchers that many quantitative methods might miss. Specifically, observations highlight potential benefits of supporting students' perceptions of more diverse CS identities including broader understandings of the "CS nerd" identity.

This project consists of a collaborative effort between the Games+Learning+Society Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Microsoft Research to create an online community to engage girls in computer programming and game design. The goals of this community are threefold: 1) to support initial interest in computer science among young women and then build on that interest through increasingly involved participation within the community; 2) to foster the learning of programming specifically, and computational and design thinking more broadly; and 3) to provide support to the young women within the community at the critical engagement and learning points. At SIGCSE 2014 we will present the first major phase of the project-an updated version of our team's Studio K curriculum for teaching game design and computational thinking to middle and high school students. We will also report on early research findings from the first all-girl cohorts to complete the curriculum.

We present a method for extracting parts of objects from wholes (e.g. "speedometer" from "car"). Given a very large corpus our method finds part words with 55% accuracy for the top 50 words as ranked by the system. The part list could be scanned by an end-user and added to an existing ontology (such as WordNet), or used as a part of a rough semantic lexicon.