While numerous studies have explored the integration of accessibility into computing courses, including software engineering courses, most focus on awareness-building or post-development WCAG compliance testing, often overlooking the shift-left principle, which advocates for embedding accessibility considerations early in the software development lifecycle, particularly during the design and planning stages. To address this gap, we redesigned a software engineering course to incorporate accessibility from the outset, beginning with requirements elicitation and UX design. Students received targeted training in using accessibility evaluation tools such as Stark and Axe for Figma during the design phase, followed by continued testing in the post-development (testing) phase using tools like AChecker and WAVE. We analyzed student projects to understand common accessibility issues detected and fixed across phases, and compared issue types across tools. Our findings affirm the value of a multi-tool, multi-phase approach: early design checks enable the identification and remediation of low-effort, high-impact issues, thereby reducing rework and freeing bandwidth for more complex development-level fixes. This work provides practical insights for computing educators aiming to meaningfully integrate accessibility into core software engineering curricula and contributes to a broader cultural shift toward building accessible technologies by design.

This experience report contributes to the expanding body of literature advocating for the inclusion of accessibility topics within core computing courses rather than restricting them to specialized electives such as human-computer interaction (HCI). We integrated an accessibility-focused sprint into a 3-credit software engineering course at a large private university in the US. Throughout the course, students progressively developed a software project in groups with a dedicated sprint designed to emphasize the importance of accessibility. This sprint included lectures on accessibility principles and hands-on accessibility testing on their own projects, followed by a sprint to fix the issues found. A survey was conducted at the end of the course to gauge their learning outcomes and perceptions of accessibility. The results demonstrate that integrating accessibility into a software engineering course not only enhances students' technical skills but also boosts their commitment to creating inclusive software. We present the accessibility interventions made, assessment instruments used and our findings in this report. We also offer key insights as takeaways for the computing education community, providing guidance for educators aiming to embed accessibility into their curriculum.

With over 95% of the top one million websites not being fully accessible, teaching digital accessibility to computing students is crucial. In this study, conducted over three spring semesters within a Software Engineering project course, we introduced dedicated sprints focused on accessibility. During these sprints, students were taught about various types of disabilities, accessibility principles, web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG), and various automated and manual techniques to test for accessibility. Students utilized automated tools to identify accessibility issues in their web projects and subsequently dedicated another sprint to address and resolve these issues. We systematically documented common accessibility mistakes students make, highlighting the WCAG 'success criteria' that require careful instructional focus. Additionally, we identify which accessibility issues are frequently and easily resolved by students and which challenges persist despite their efforts. This comprehensive analysis provides valuable insights, enabling the computing education community to effectively integrate and emphasize accessibility instruction in their curricula, ultimately fostering more inclusive and accessible web development practices.

In recent years, there has been rising interest from both governments and private industry in developing software that is accessible to all, including people with disabilities. However, the computer science (CS) courses that ought to prepare future professionals to develop such accessible software hardly cover topics related to accessibility. While there is growing literature on incorporating accessibility topics in computing education in the West, there is little work on this in the Global South, particularly in India, which has a large number of computing students and software professionals. In this replication report, we present (A) our findings from a replication of surveys used in the US and Switzerland on who teaches accessibility and barriers to teaching accessibility and (B) a qualitative analysis of perceptions of CS faculty in India about digital accessibility and teaching accessibility. Our study corroborates the findings of the earlier surveys: very few CS faculty teach accessibility, and the top barriers they perceive are the same. The qualitative analysis further reveals that the faculty in India need training on accessibility concepts and disabilities sensitization, and exposure to existing and ongoing CS education research and pedagogies. In light of these findings, we present recommendations aimed at addressing these challenges and enhancing the integration of accessibility into computing education.

Educating students about academic integrity expectations has been suggested as one of the ways to reduce malpractice in take-home programming assignments. We test this hypothesis using data collected from an artificial intelligence course with 105 participants (N=105) at a university in India. The AI course had two programming assignments. Plagiarism through collusion was quantified using the Measure of Software Similarity (MOSS) tool. Students were educated about what constitutes academic dishonesty and were required to take an honor pledge before the start of the second take-home programming assignment. The two programming assignments were novel and did not have solutions available on the internet. We expected the mean percentage of similar lines of code to be significantly less in the second programming assignment. However, our results show no significant difference in the mean percentage of similar lines of code across the two programming assignments. We also study how the Big-five personality traits affect the propensity for plagiarism in the two take-home assignments. Our results across both assignments show that the extraversion trait of the Big Five personality exhibits a positive association, and the conscientiousness trait exhibits a negative association with plagiarism tendencies. Our result suggests that the policy of educating students about academic integrity will have a limited impact as long as students perceive an opportunity for plagiarism to be present. We explain our results using the Fraud triangle model.

Contemporary computer science graduates enter a world where numerous profound ethical dilemmas confronting society revolve around computing. Navigating the complexities of today’s technological landscape requires a profound consideration of ethical questions. Deliberations on the kinds of data to be gathered or avoided, the ethical dimensions of algorithmic decision-making, and the role of digital platforms in safeguarding democratic principles are at the forefront of discussions. Additionally, addressing biases in large language models (LLMs), ensuring responsible AI practices, and evaluating the technology industry’s contributions to climate change are pivotal aspects.

The growing interest in accessible software reflects in computing educators' and education researchers' efforts to include accessibility in core computing education. We integrated accessibility in a junior/senior-level Android app development course at a large private university in India. The course introduced three accessibility-related topics using various interventions: Accessibility Awareness (a guest lecture by a legal expert), Technical Knowledge (lectures on Android accessibility guidelines and testing practices and graded components for implementing accessibility in programming assignments), and Empathy (an activity that required students to blindfold themselves and interact with their phones using a screen-reader). We evaluated their impact on student learning using three instruments: (A) A pre/post-course questionnaire, (B) Reflective questions on each of the four programming assignments, and (C) Midterm and Final exam questions. Our findings demonstrate that: (A) significantly more (p <.05) students considered disabilities when designing an app after taking this course, (B) many students developed empathy towards the challenges persons with disabilities face while using inaccessible apps, and (C) all students could correctly identify at least one accessibility issue in the user interface of a real-world app given its screenshot and 90% of them could provide a correct solution to fix it.

Despite a growing emphasis on accessible software, these topics find little mention in computing curricula. Less than 5 percent of our students mentioned disabilities when asked to list concerns in designing an app, although other inclusivity considerations were relatively common. We present the preliminary findings of our questionnaire and details of our interventions to teach accessibility in an Android-focussed Software Engineering course in this poster.

There are about one billion persons with disabilities (PWDs) in the world [8]. Between 40 and 80 million of them are in India [5]. In 2015, the Government of India launched the Sugamya Bhārat Abhiyān (Accessible India Campaign), a “nation-wide Campaign for achieving universal accessibility for PWDs”. One of its three components, “Information and Communication Eco-System Accessibility”, focuses on accessible softwares and digital artifacts. The private industry is also increasingly emphasizing developing softwares that are accessible to everyone [See, e.g., 3, 4, 7, 1]. However, the CS curricula that ought to prepare the future professionals to develop such accessible softwares hardly cover topics related to accessibility.

Researchers have stressed the importance of argumentation among small groups of students in STEM courses to help them develop deep understanding. But it is not widely used in college courses due to such challenges as finding time in already packed courses, effective organization of argumentation in large classrooms, etc. This paper presents a novel online approach to enable argumentation to be adopted widely.One interesting question we investigated in a junior-level computing course concerned the structure of such arguments. Common experience with online forums in courses suggests that a handful of students dominate them while others hardly participate. So we expected that round-based discussions where each student in the group made one submission in each round, the submission not being available to the others until the start of the next round, would be more effective than forum-based discussions where students made as many submissions as they wished and whenever they wished to, and saw each submission as soon as it was made. But to our surprise, the results showed that both were equally effective! We present the details of our approach, the unexpected results from our course, some hypotheses that may explain the results, and future plans to investigate this further.

Piaget's classic work on cognitive development showed that engaging learners in critical discussions with peers about ideas that are different than theirs leads to deep conceptual understanding. Implementing such an approach in computer science and, more generally, STEM, courses has some specific challenges. Based on Piaget's theory, we have developed a highly innovative collaborative learning approach that exploits specific affordances of web technologies to address these challenges. It allows small groups of students with different ideas about the topic in question, to engage in a highly-structured discussion that enables each student in the group to develop deep understanding. While a number of researchers have explored approaches to collaborative learning, a key difference with our work is that our focus is helping individual students develop deep understanding, whereas the focus of much of this other work is on developing students' team skills, effective communication abilities, and the like. We have tested our approach in an undergraduate CS course and the effect on student performance was encouraging; moreover, about two-thirds of the students in the course, based on a post-activity survey, felt that the approach was effective in helping them develop conceptual understanding.

Collaborative learning is a key component of software engineering (SE) courses in most undergraduate computing curricula. Thus these courses include fairly intensive team projects, the intent being to ensure that not only do students develop an understanding of key software engineering concepts and practices, but also develop the skills needed to work effectively in large design and development teams. But there is a definite risk in collaborative learning in that there is a potential that individual learning gets lost in the focus on the team's success in completing the project (s). While the team's success is indeed the primary goal of an industrial SE team, ensuring individual learning is obviously an essential goal of SE courses. We have developed a novel approach that exploits the affordances of mobile and web technologies to help ensure that individual students in teams in SE courses develop a thorough understanding of the relevant concepts and practices while working on team projects, indeed, that the team contributes in an essential manner to the learning of each member of the team. We describe the learning theory underlying our approach, provide some details concerning the prototype implementation of a tool based on the approach, and describe how we are using it in an SE course in our program.

Conflict and cooperation would seem to be ideas that are diametrically opposed to each other. But, in fact, classic work by Piaget on how children and adults learn shows that when learners engage with peers in critical discussion of ideas concerning which they have different understandings, that contributes very effectively to learners developing deep understanding of the concepts involved. At the same time, getting students in undergraduate computing (or other technical/engineering) courses to engage with other students in thoughtful discussion of important concepts is very challenging. It can be especially difficult to get women students and students from other underrepresented groups to participate effectively in such discussions. In our work, we exploit the affordances of mobile and web technologies to address these challenges. Our approach not only helps address these challenges, it has a number of other important advantages over face-to-face discussions. We present the theoretical underpinnings of the approach, some details of our prototype implementation, preliminary results from the use of the prototype in a junior/senior level class on Software Engineering, and the design for the next version of our tool. We also discuss the possibilities and usefulness of applying this approach in a range of computing courses from traditional classrooms to MOOCs.