This Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session offers LGBTQ+ researchers, educators, and practitioners in computing education an inclusive space for community-building, advocacy, and creative expression. The session seeks to expand beyond traditional networking by offering attendees a variety of opt-in activities, such as fiber arts, crafting, media sharing, and Pittsburgh-themed games. Attendees will have the opportunity to decompress after a long conference day, participate in discussions on queer scholarship and activism, and explore ways to make computing education more inclusive to LGBTQ+ individuals.

This Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session will offer LGBTQ+ researchers and practitioners at SIGCSE TS a space for networking, sharing experiences, and being in community together. Given the consistent marginalization of the LGBTQ+ community, this BOF aims to create a community at SIGCSE of professors, students, researchers, and practitioners with interest in computing education. The BOF will provide a space for people to decompress from the long conference day through playing board games and socializing. There is also space for attendees to discuss ways computing education and SIGCSE could be more inclusive to the LGBTQ+ community.

This panel will highlight the experiences of Black, Asian, and Latinx women and non-binary instructors as junior faculty. Despite efforts to broaden participation, CS departments are often quite homogeneous, forcing faculty of marginalized identities to attenuate certain aspects of, or entire identities, to better "fit in" with their colleagues. We will discuss the impacts on faculty and engage with the audience to identify avenues of individual (i.e., colleagues) and systemic (i.e., department culture and policies) allyship.

Many initiatives have focused on attracting girls and young women (K-12 or college) to computer science education. However, professional women who never learned to program have been largely ignored, despite the fact that such individuals may have many opportunities to benefit from enhanced skills and attitudes about computer programming. To provide a convenient learning space for this population, we created and evaluated the impacts of a nine-week web development workshop that was carefully designed to be both comfortable and engaging for this population. In this article, we report how the professionals’ attitudes and skills grew over the course of the workshop and how they now expect to integrate these skills and attitudes into their everyday lives.

CSEd graduate students face a variety of unique issues. First, within a CS or information science program, this research area is not considered to be highly popular with respect to the quantity of CSEd faculty, graduate courses, and professionals immersed in this research area. Already, this presents a disadvantage compared to other peers in popular areas who have resources and/or a research community at their institutions to support them. Further, graduate students in this field are frequently one of the few, if not the only, CSEd researchers at their institutions. As a result, many graduate students have limited avenues to get consistent, relevant, critical feedback on their work, especially research-in-progress, i.e. research that has not already been published. In this Birds of a Feather (BoF) session, we aim to create and foster a safe and open environment that allows participants to get feedback on research-in-progress and share experiences and issues with being a graduate student in CSEd research. We invite genuine and honest conversations about the challenges facing rising academics and professionals in this area. Though the focus will be on CSEd research graduate students, any attendee who would like to hear about our experiences is welcome. We have two goals: (1) to cultivate mentorship relationships among participants to send them off with potential collaborators, supporters and advocates, and (2) to brainstorm ways to sustain these discussions in the ACM CSEd community.

Non-programmers, in particular, those who identify as female or gender-diverse, experience many factors that hinder their ultimate interest, participation, and success in programming. Prior work has delved into the problem of underrepresentation in STEM and specifically in Computing Education to uncover the barriers impacting these groups. Yet, attraction and retention remains a challenge. I argue that while formal learning pathways are critical to increasing participation of diverse learners, it is also integral to provide informal and non-formal learning opportunities as well. My research uses mixed-methods within a design-based research approach to offer and evaluate an active learning beginners' programming workshop called Code For Her. The workshop is designed to introduce females and gender-diverse individuals to web development. My goal is to analyze participants' experiences and progress within a trajectory framework, producing a narrative of their behaviors and attitudes over both short-term and longer-term intervals. In a pilot study of the workshop design, I observed increases in self-efficacy and positive attitudes, as well as changes in ways of thinking about computing. I note that the brief exposure of a workshop may seed understanding and skills in computation, but is not likely to convert non-programmers into programmers. Instead, I am exploring a new construct - computational grounding - that refers to participants' enhanced orientation toward computing-related behaviors. I will operationalize and study this construct using the workshop activities, thereby enhancing discussions of computational thinking.

Inspired by initiatives like Girls Who Code, the authors developed a similar learning opportunity in a higher education environment. Code for Her, a nine-week coding workshop series, was piloted to determine if interest existed in the academic community. With an overwhelming response (over 100 applicants), the authors saw a need in the community for an informal learning space targeting women and gender-diverse individuals. Currently, two distinct workshop sections, one for students and one for faculty and staff, are being conducted in a single academic semester, each focusing on learning three web development languages. The goal of this study is to investigate the impacts of the workshop series on its participants using a mixed methods approach. The authors will examine measures of self-efficacy, computing behavior, knowledge, and learning to determine, at an exploratory level, how the workshops have an effect on their learning, motivation, attitudes, and computational thinking. Preliminary results from a baseline survey indicate that keeping a flexible curriculum and learning environment is imperative to the ever-changing needs of participants week to week. Further, results indicate a slightly positive attitude towards achieving programming tasks, future predictors of their behavior after the workshop, and self-efficacy. The authors plan to conduct a post survey, collect participant projects as artifacts for analysis, and arrange follow-up focus groups to determine if participant attitudes, motivation, and retention of the content have changed over a period of time. The authors hope to improve future workshop offerings and expand our research efforts.

Many CSE programs have begun to mandate a human-centered design (HCD) course as part of degree requirements. Rather than abstracting out messy humans to a single generic 'user', HCD requires solution designers to use their innate creativity and empathy to work alongside a varied group of people who will be most impacted by a new system. However, many CSE students tend to keep a narrowed focus on system-only behavior and the human inter-relation skills necessary to do HCD well may not come naturally to CSE students. Within HCD projects, this becomes a problem given that project teams consist not just of designers, developers and project managers, but also increasingly of core users, in a co-design or participatory design process. Figuring out ways to get students to define a problem completely, account for human needs in solution ideas, and work alongside actual users can be a struggle for many in the CSE education field. This BOF is intended to share ideas for how to appropriately teach the mindset and methods skillset of HCD to typical CSE students. This session is directed at the sharing and collaborating around teaching resources, techniques, in-class activities and assignments for HCD education. Handouts.

Females, racial minorities, and other diverse individuals face many challenges in learning to program. Researchers have investigated these challenges for many years, yet participation by these groups continues to be low. Our action research project is investigating a non-formal learning activity for female and gender-diverse faculty, staff, and students in a university setting. Using surveys, observations and focus groups, we probed learners' experiences, to examine the short- and longer-term impacts of the workshop. We observed increases in self-efficacy and predictions of future use of programming; trepidation about computing decreased. We discuss the need to offer learning spaces for skills that can empower members of these groups.

In this paper, we describe the first phase of a longitudinal study focusing on young people's attitudes towards computing careers and their computational self-efficacy. Using summer camps as a springboard to pique their interests, we are interested in enhancing their knowledge in computing topics and assessing their views through surveys. Working from the findings of this first phase in the project, we discuss our future plans for an online community learning system that is grounded in a socio-cognitive learning process, and intended to engage young people in continuous engagement with and exposure to computing concepts and skills.