Our goal is to educate individuals on how to create technology that is fair, responsible, and respectful of all people and communities. Too often, software is developed without considering important ethical dimensions such as bias, privacy, or transparency, which can result in harmful or exclusionary outcomes, particularly in fields like healthcare, education, and finance.

Ensuring accessibility is essential for developing software that is inclusive for all users. Unfortunately, research shows that a significant portion of modern software fails to meet accessibility standards. Many students not only lack the knowledge of how to create accessible software but also do not fully grasp why it matters. To bridge this educational gap, we created a series of labs called the Accessible Learning Labs (ALL). These labs are designed to teach the techniques for developing accessible software, while also emphasizing the importance of accessibility in software design. Through hands-on activities, students can experience the consequences of inaccessible software and learn to fix these issues to make the software more accessible. This collection of labs is beneficial to learners at various stages, from beginners to professionals looking to improve their skills in creating accessible software. All materials are available on the project website: https://all.rit.edu

Accessibility is a crucial component in developing inclusive software. However, studies reveal that much of today's software is not designed with accessibility in mind. This issue is compounded by the fact that students often lack an understanding of both how to create accessible software and why it is important. To address this educational gap, we developed a set of labs known as Accessible Learning Labs (ALL). These experiential labs aim to teach participants the proper methods for creating accessible software while highlighting the significance of inclusivity. Additionally, these labs allow students to experience the effects of inaccessible software firsthand and apply corrective measures to improve accessibility. All project materials are freely accessible on the project website: https://all.rit.edu.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly prevalent in our society, leading to a growing demand for a skilled workforce in AI. Unfortunately, this demand remains unmet, particularly among smaller institutions and those serving underrepresented groups, due to resource limitations. This initiative offers two hands-on educational activities in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to facilitate the integration of AI/ML concepts into foundational computing and non-computing courses. While primarily aimed at undergraduate students, the materials created can also benefit high school (grades 9–12) and graduate students in various educational settings, including traditional classrooms and outreach or after-school programs. Labs are accessible through a web browser, making them easy to adopt at all institutions, especially those with limited resources. The self-contained and hosted nature of the labs ensures that they can be adopted by institutions facing resource constraints. The complete project material is publicly available on the project website: https://all.rit.edu

Accessibility is a key aspect in ensuring the development of inclusive software. Unfortunately, research demonstrates that a large portion of software today is not created in an accessible manner. Problematically, students may not understand how to create accessible software, additionally misunderstanding the importance of creating accessible software. To fill the gap in accessibility education, we have created a comprehensive collection of labs, collectively referred to as Accessible Learning Labs (ALL). They have the primary objectives of educating participants on how to properly create accessible software, simultaneously illustrating the need to create inclusive and accessible software. In addition, the lab activities enable students to experience the implications of inaccessible software and make repairs based on their experience, making the software in the labs accessible. This will benefit many members of the software engineering community, ranging from beginning-level students to experienced practitioners who want to ensure that they are properly creating accessible and inclusive software. Complete project material is publicly available on the project website: https://all.rit.edu

This research full paper presents a study demonstrating the importance of empathy-building content in computing education to foster appreciation for accessible software. Past research identifies a lack of empathy among developers contributing to software inclusion issues. We propose that enhancing empathy can lead to more accessible and equitable software development. Despite empathy studies in other fields, integrating empathy into computing education lacks sufficient pedagogical insights and accessible resources. To address these gaps, we conducted an in-person study with 121 participants, using a randomized experimental design with two empathy-building intervention groups. We compared their responses to pre-/post-survey questions using statistical tests, examining experiential and expression-based interventions' impact on inclusiveness interest and awareness of non-inclusive software. Our research questions focused on whether these interventions increase the interest, awareness, and empathy of participants and if they are equally effective across demographics and intervention formats. Our findings demonstrate that empathy-building interventions effectively raise awareness and empathy among participants. Expression-based interventions significantly increase empathy and awareness across age and gender groups, with no significant differences in impact between experiential and expression-based methods. Furthermore, we provide an easily adoptable web-based educational lab to integrate empathy and inclusive development topics into diverse curricula formats, accessible via our project website: https://all.rit.edu

Creating accessible software is imperative for making software inclusive for all users.Unfortunately, the topic of accessibility is frequently excluded from computing education, leading to scenarios where students are unaware of either how to develop accessible software or see the need to create it. To address this challenge, we have created a set of educational labs that are systematically designed to not only inform students about fundamental topics in producing accessible software but also demonstrate its importance. Over the previous year, these labs were included in several Computer Science 2 offerings at the Rochester Institute of Technology, comprising a total of 500 student participants. This article discusses instructional observations from these offerings, some of which include the following: (i) many of the research findings from previous efforts remain true with the larger, more diverse evaluation; (ii) our created material and format reduced students’ belief that creating accessible software was difficult in relation to the baseline,; (iii) we observed that our created material and format benefited student opinion that creating accessible software is important, and (iv) computing majors may not be uniformly impacted by experiential educational accessibility material. The educational labs are publicly available on the project website (https://all.rit.edu).

Our Accessibility Learning Labs not only inform participants about the need for accessible software, but also how to properly create and implement accessible software. These experiential browser-based labs enable participants, instructors and practitioners to engage in our material using only their browser. In the following document, we will provide a brief overview of our labs, how they may be adopted, and some of their preliminary results. Complete project material is publicly available on our project website: http://all.rit.edu

This tutorial will introduce our Accessibility Learning Labs (ALL). The objectives of this collaborative project with The National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) are to both inform participants about foundational topics in accessibility and to demonstrate the importance of creating accessible software. The labs enable easy classroom inclusion by providing instructors all necessary materials including lecture and activity slides and videos. Each lab addresses an accessibility issue and contains: I) Relevant background information on the examined issue II) An example web-based application containing the accessibility problem III) A process to emulate this accessibility problem IV) Details about how to repair the problem from a technical perspective V) Incidents from people who encountered this accessibility issue and how it has impacted their life. The labs may be easily integrated into a wide variety of curriculum at high schools (9–12), and in undergraduate and graduate courses. The labs will be easily adoptable due to their self-contained nature and their inclusion of all necessary instructional material (e.g., slides, quizzes, etc.). No special software is required to use any portion of the labs since they are web-based and are able to run on any computer with a reasonably recent web browser. There are currently four available labs on the topics of: Colorblindness, Hearing, Blindness and Dexterity. Material is available on our website: http://all.rit.edu This tutorial will provide an overview of the created labs and usage instructions and information for adaptors.

Software engineering is largely a communication-driven, team-oriented discipline. There are numerous hurdles for ensuring proper communication and interaction between all project stakeholders, including physical, technological, and cultural barriers. These obstructions not only affect software engineering in industry, but in academia as well. One possible issue that is often overlooked in software engineering education is how to best educate Deaf and hard-of-hearing (Deaf/HoH) students, and how to fully engage them in the classroom. In this paper, we present our experiences in teaching software engineering to Deaf/HoH students. In the classroom, these students work very closely in activities and on project teams with their hearing peers. We also present recommendations for creating a more robust software engineering educational experience for not only Deaf/HoH students, but for hearing students as well. We encourage instructors not only in software engineering programs, but in other computing disciplines to consider our recommendations and observations in order to enhance the educational experience for all students in the classroom, whether Deaf/HoH or hearing.

Software development teams face a critical threat to the security of their systems: insiders. A malicious insider is a person who violates an authorized level of access in a software system. Unfortunately, when creating software, developers do not typically account for insider threat. Students learning software development are unaware of the impacts of malicious actors and are far too often untrained in prevention methods against them. A few of the defensive mechanisms to protect against insider threats include eliminating system access once an employee leaves an organization, enforcing principle of least privilege, code reviews, and constant monitoring for suspicious activity. At the Department of Software Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, we require a course titled Engineering of Secure Software and have created an activity designed to prepare students for the problem of insider threats. At the beginning of this activity, student teams are given the task of designing a moderately sized secure software system. The goal of this insider is to manipulate the team into creating a flawed system design that would allow attackers to perform malicious activities once the system has been created. When the insider is revealed at the conclusion of the project, students discuss countermeasures regarding the malicious actions the insiders were able to plan or complete, along with methods of prevention that may have been employed by the team to detect the malicious developer. In this paper, we describe the activity along with the results of a survey. We discuss the benefits and challenges of the activity with the goal of giving other instructors the tools they need to conduct this activity at their institution. While many institutions do not offer courses in computer security, this self-contained activity may be used in any computing course to enforce the importance of protecting against insider threats.

Web applications are an extremely important and ubiquitous part of today's world. Students must not only know how to develop them from a technical perspective, but in doing so need to understand how to follow the proper principles of software engineering - delivering the project on time, on budget, and in a high quality manner. At the Department of Software Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, we offer a Web Engineering course which not only introduces students to a variety of web technologies, but more importantly it shows them how to use them in a collaborative environment while properly utilizing web engineering methodologies. The course includes a significant project component requiring students to use a variety of contemporary technologies and resources to create a robust web application. The main premise of the project is for each group to create a web portal using both custom-built and already existing components. The project takes place over the entire 15 week course term, includes multiple releases, and has students work in teams of 4-5. This innovative project component has received significant praise from both students and faculty members while fulfilling an emerging area of our curriculum. Students enjoy the real-world nature of the project and the ability to work with contemporary technologies in a format which closely mimics what they will see in industry. This paper outlines the educational objectives, project details, some sample project results of our class offering, as well as student feedback about the project. The goal of this work is to share the project, its importance, and lessons learned for use at other institutions with similar educational goals.

Android has grown to be the world's most popular mobile platform with apps that are capable of doing everything from checking sports scores to purchasing stocks. In order to assist researchers and developers in better understanding the development process as well as the current state of the apps themselves, we present a large dataset of analyzed open-source Android applications and provide a brief analysis of the data, demonstrating potential usefulness. This dataset contains 1,179 applications, including 4,416 different versions of these apps and 435,680 total commits. Furthermore, for each app we include the analytical results obtained from several static analysis tools including Androguard, Sonar, and Stowaway. In order to better support the community in conducting research on the security characteristics of the apps, our large analytical dataset comes with the detailed information including various versions of AndroidManifest.xml files and synthesized information such as permissions, intents, and minimum SDK. We collected 13,036 commits of the manifest files and recorded over 69,707 total permissions used. The results and a brief set of analytics are presented on our website: http://androsec.rit.edu.

Although testing often accounts for 50% of the budget of a typical software project, the subject of software testing is often overlooked in computing curriculum. Students often view testing as a boring and unnecessary task, and education is usually focused on building software, not ensuring its quality. Previous works have focused on either making the subject of testing more exciting for students or on a more potent lecture-based learning process. At the Department of Software Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, recent efforts have been focused on the project component of our Software Testing course as an area of innovation. Rather than previous methods such as a tightly controlled and repetitive testbed, our students are allowed to choose a real-world, open source project to test throughout the term. With the instructor as both counsel and client, students are expected to deliver a test plan, a final report, and several class-wide presentations. This project has achieved significant student praise; qualitative and quantitative feedback demonstrates both increased satisfaction and fulfilled curricular requirements. Students enjoy the real-world aspect of the project and the ability to work with relevant applications and technologies. This paper outlines the project details and educational goals.