The Hispanics in Computing group has been around for over a decade and serves as a networking group bringing together members of this community. Members of the group organize gatherings at national conferences to strengthen the social ties that connect this small community. This Birds of a Feather seeks to bring together Hispanics and other members of the CS Education Community interested in providing support to Hispanics. The Hispanics in Computing community was founded in 2009. Since then, the group has been meeting at annual conferences as a way to provide networking opportunities for Hispanic students and professors. As an added benefit, this group has become a resource to the larger computing community. The group has grown in numbers and in their online presence hosting a Facebook group, LinkedIn group, and a website. But by far, the most active medium of communication is the Hispanics in Computing listserv with more than 400 members. This group serves as a source of mentors for students and faculty, as a point of dissemination for faculty positions, and as a way to discuss topics relevant to the community. This gathering at the Technical Symposium will allow Hispanics to meet face to face and discuss issues important to our community. As the number of Hispanics in our classrooms grows, it is important that we provide mentors and role models for these new students.

Women in underserved communities of computing such as women of color, women in poverty, elderly women, women with disabilities, and mothers who prioritize their families over their careers have little to no access to training or career development in a technical field due to lack of childcare, limited availability, lack of education, lack of employment history, transportation, and financial cost of training. Women from these groups often suffer from trauma or imposter syndrome lacking the confidence to believe they are capable of working with technology. Yet, in 2022, women are 91% of the households with children in public housing, which is more than 232 thousand households. Children from these households have very little possibility of social mobility from the bottom to the top quintile. There is a dearth of computer training opportunities for these women. A community computing learning center that is inclusive of and tailored to all mothers and their children would help to fill the void in the US technical workforce and break the cycle of poverty that exists in many low-income communities. Universities can play a critical role in the participatory design of these centers so that they can dually serve as an equity-enabling computer education research center for its faculty and students. Women led the computing revolution in the past and can lead the culturally responsive computing education movement of the future.

The Hispanics in Computing group has been around for over a decade and serves as a networking group bringing together members of this community. Members of the group organize gatherings at national conferences to strengthen the social ties that connect this small community. This Birds of a Feather seeks to bring together Hispanics and other members of the CS Education Community interested in providing support to Hispanics.

Typing programs can be difficult or impossible for programmers with motor impairments. Programming by voice can be a promising alternative. In this research, we explored the perceptions of motor-impaired programmers with regard to programming by voice. We learned that leveraging existing voice-based programming platforms to speak code can be more complicated than it needs to be. The interviewees expressed their frustration with long hours of memorizing unnatural commands in order to enter code by voice. In addition, we found a preference for being able to speak code in a flexible manner without requiring strict adherence to a grammar.

Most computer programs are designed in a way that requires interaction based on finger movements and hand gestures. This type of environment, which assumes the dexterity of human hands, presents limitations for those with motor disabilities. This limitation excludes this population from learning to code and, for those who develop a musculoskeletal disorder in later stages, could jeopardize their programming careers. The objective of this research is to design a Voice User Interface (or VUI for its acronym in English) that allows the use of the user’s voice to program in an Integrated Development Environment (or IDE for its acronym in English). For this, a basic programming structure was defined using Alexa Skills, which allows the user to declare variables, print values, solve basic mathematical expressions, insert conditional expressions, and create loops. An online text editor was created using CodeMirror to run user input using the Python programming language. However, the results could not yet be evaluated since the application does not have a compiler integrated. In future work it is desired to add the compiler, and thus to be able to execute the user’s program in the online editor. The aim is to also add the ability to edit, debug and move the cursor using the Alexa Skill.

OBJECTIVE: Information gaps that accompany hurricanes and floods limit researchers' ability to determine the impact of disasters on population health. Defining key use cases for sharing complex disaster data with research communities and facilitators, and barriers to doing so are key to promoting population health research for disaster recovery. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted a mixed-methods needs assessment with 15 population health researchers using interviews and card sorting. Interviews examined researchers' information needs by soliciting barriers and facilitators in the context of their expertise and research practices. Card sorting ranked priority use cases for disaster preparedness. RESULTS: Seven barriers and 6 facilitators emerged from interviews. Barriers to collaborative research included process limitations, collaboration dynamics, and perception of research importance. Barriers to data and technology adoption included data gaps, limitations in information quality, transparency issues, and difficulty to learn. Facilitators to collaborative research included collaborative engagement and human resource processes. Facilitators to data and technology adoption included situation awareness, data quality considerations, adopting community standards, and attractive to learn. Card sorting prioritized 15 use cases and identified 30 additional information needs for population health research in disaster preparedness. CONCLUSIONS: Population health researchers experience barriers to collaboration and adoption of data and technology that contribute to information gaps and limit disaster preparedness. The priority use cases we identified can help address information gaps by informing the design of supportive research tools and practices for disaster preparedness. Supportive tools should include information on data collection practices, quality assurance, and education resources usable during failures in electric or telecommunications systems.

Representation of Hispanics, especially Hispanic women, is notoriously low in data science programs in higher education and in the tech industry. The engagement of undergraduate students in research, often and early in their path towards degree completion, has been championed as one of the principal reforms necessary to increase the number of capable professionals in STEM. The benefits attributed to undergraduate research experiences have been reported to disproportionately benefit individuals from groups that have been historically underrepresented in STEM. The IDI-BD2K (Increasing Diversity in Interdisciplinary Big Data to Knowledge) Program funded by the NIH at the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras (UPRRP) was designed to bridge the increasing digital and data divide at the university. The college's population is 98 percent Hispanic and yet there is no formal data science program. There also exists a gender imbalance in computing at the College of Natural Sciences at the UPRRP. Over 60 percent of the undergraduate students in Biology are women. However, the percentage of women in Computer Science hovers around 15 percent. The IDI-BD2K was created to address both these concerns and increase the participation of Hispanics in interdisciplinary computational and quantitative research. In this talk, I will highlight the need for mutually beneficial university collaborations to reduce the digital and data divide, create greater awareness of the growing disparities and increase the number of future faculty with experience teaching diverse students.

This special session is intended for people who are curious about integrating Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) into their courses and involving students in HFOSS projects. HFOSS participation provides an excellent vehicle to introduce students to computing for social good while also giving them experience with real-world software development. The session will begin with a series of lightning talks by faculty who have incorporated HFOSS participation into one or more of their courses. This will be followed by a small group activity to allow attendees to ask questions and discuss individual interests in integrating HFOSS activities and to become familiar with HFOSS educational resources available for instructors. The session will conclude with some closing comments on current and planned activities of instructors who are teaching with HFOSS and suggestions for faculty who would like to pursue this teaching approach themselves.

Exploring Computer Science (ECS) [1] spawned from the need to provide access to Computer Science to everyone in the US. The success and commitment to equity and diversity of the ECS curriculum in Latina/o communities inspired an interdisciplinary group of educators from the University of Puerto Rico to tackle the lack of K-12 CSE on the island. This group recognized the need to implode the self-perception of Latinas (os) as being foreign to computing [2] by educating them about Computer Science. Teachers were identified as the catalyst change agents to transform Puerto Ricans students into contributors and creators of technology through computing. The intended audience for this panel consists of practitioners and creators of curriculum looking for creative strategies to engage students from diverse cultural backgrounds in computing using their native language.

This paper intends to share both the experience of teachers and document the research of the design, implementation, and evaluation of a massive open online course (MOOC). The primary purpose of the MOOC was to do outreach and build community to interest teachers from any discipline in Puerto Rico to incorporate Computational Thinking (CT) into their curriculum and peak their interest in Computer Science Education (CSE). Additional objectives were to use CT as a way to build self-efficacy in high school teachers as integrators of this newly gained knowledge while investigators learned the state of CSE and technology integration in schools of Puerto Rico. The MOOC titled Integrating Computational Thinking into the Curriculum was the first free online Professional Development offered to educators in Puerto Rico and has served as the launching board for the Computer Science Teachers' Association (CSTA) in Puerto Rico. This paper will describe the course's development, content and pertinent activities as they relate to the established goals of the project. Finally, it will share some vignettes of the educators' experiences as well as the results of a survey that was administered to 164 participants of the MOOC in its second rendition and had a 32% response rate.

Through their experience with the ICERT REU program at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), two undergraduate students from the University of Puerto Rico and the University of Florida have initiated a collaboration between their home institutions and TACC exploring the possibility of using immersion to simulate perceptual disturbances. Perceptual disturbances are subjective in nature, and difficult to communicate verbally. Often caretakers or those closest to sufferers have difficulty understanding the nature of their suffering. Immersion provides an exciting opportunity to directly communicate percepts with clinicians and loved ones. Here, we present a prototype environment meant to simulate some of the perceptual disturbances associated with seizures and epilepsy. Following further validation of our approach, we hope to promote awareness and empathy for these often jarring phenomena.

This paper describes the experience of the first author with the Point-and-Click Interface of the OnScreenDualScribe, created by the last author. The new interface is an innovative extension to the previous interface which required the use of the DualPad. The main differences between the two interfaces are highlighted. The user took several writing tests with the Point-and Click Interface and compares her results with two of interfaces she uses the most for writing, Dragon NaturallySpeaking and SofType. Finally, the first author recommends several improvements to the interface which would make the software a better alternative for her.

Speech recognition software technology provides people with limited hand mobility or visual impairments the opportunity to work with computers through an alternative approach. However, when it comes to programming, voice recognition systems leave much to be desired. To tackle this problem, we have developed a generic vocabulary and grammar to help a user to program by voice in any C-based language. With the purpose of validating the aforementioned vocabulary and grammar, receiving feedback from the programming community and determining future features for enhancement, we administered a survey and distributed it among faculty members and advanced computer science and engineering students. Our objective is to create an assistive technology tool that will serve the community with limited hand mobility or visual impairments yet will be accepted and embraced as the spoken programming language and model of choice for implementation.

Programming is an arduous task for individuals with motor impairments who rely on independent tools to interact with their digital environment. Providing a bimodal Integrated Development Environment is key to tackling a program's complex syntax and to improving the programming interface. This project is an effort to facilitate the interaction between programmers with motor impairments in their hands and Integrated Development Environments (IDE's) through the integration of modified versions of open source assistive technology software. We are working on the prototype for a specific user, who is a computer scientist with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) that can no longer physically attend classes and can only type with one finger. The user is a crucial part of this project providing invaluable input into the design of the interface.

The age of technology has changed the way that surgeons are being trained. Traditional methodologies for training can include lecturing, shadowing, apprenticing, and developing skills within live clinical situations. Computerized tools which simulate surgical procedures and/or experiences can allow for "virtual" experiences to enhance the traditional training procedures that can dramatically improve upon the older methods. However, such systems do not to adapt to the training context. We describe a ubiquitous computing system that tracks low-level events in the surgical training room (e.g. student locations, lessons completed, learning tasks assigned, and performance metrics) and from these derive the training context. This can be used to create an adaptive training system.