Undergraduate computing programs have struggled to meet the demand for computing education. The increase in teaching needs has expanded the creation and hiring of teaching-track positions (i.e., at least 50% time spent on teaching). However, many job openings go unfilled due to hiring difficulties such as perceived gaps in applicant qualifications and applicant confusion over varied job characteristics. This places increased scrutiny on the teaching-track recruitment process to (1) identify promising candidates who might not have sufficient qualifications and (2) transparently communicate the job responsibilities and expectations.

As Computer Science undergraduate programs continue to increase in response to the still-unmet student demand, one growing trend is to engage current students as instructors of record, allowing for increases in course offerings and/or enrollments and giving these students extraordinary experiences in teaching. Despite these benefits, there are significant concerns that could be raised: do these student instructors have the maturity and training to handle the additional job requirements such as mentoring junior teaching staff, resolving difficult interpersonal situations, addressing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) issues, and garnering respect from students who might be a similar age? The goal of this panel is not to claim this solution is novel, but to share lessons learned, including the student instructor perspective, from faculty whose four institutions have been doing this successfully for years, each taking different approaches to engagement and pre-service professional development.

For many students, virtual memory serves as the introduction to abstraction in the context of software-hardware interfaces, but the sheer scale and associated complexity of virtual memory make it a difficult concept to grasp holistically. To address this, visual simulators have been developed and proven to be effective in enhancing student understanding of computer organization topics. However, a combination of limited user-friendliness, comprehensiveness, and accessibility can make existing virtual memory simulators difficult to approach for students. Thus, this demonstration will introduce the University of Washington's CSE351 Virtual Memory Simulator, an interactive web tool that lets users observe the process of address translation in a more approachable manner. It improves upon the functionality and usability of existing graphical user interface (GUI) simulators by providing more comprehensive simulation (ranging from paging in and out of disk at a high level to writing individual bytes depending on permission bits), user-friendliness (auto-highlight and auto-focuses on critical states), and user instructions and concept explanations. Furthermore, the virtual memory simulator is designed as a companion tool to the CSE351 Cache Simulator and is structured similarly, making it easy to pick up when taught in conjunction with the cache simulator. The CSE351 Virtual Memory Simulator can be integrated into virtually any computer organization or operating systems course. The demonstration will include examples of student exercises and other ways to integrate the virtual memory simulator into courses. Note: Laptops are recommended to follow along with the demo.

There is a well-known capacity crisis where the number of open faculty positions in CS far exceeds the number of qualified candidates. To meet this demand, institutions are increasingly turning to teaching-track positions whose responsibilities center on teaching. Hiring efforts, though, are stymied by the lack of direct pathways to prepare new post-secondary (i.e., college and university) instructors with adequate computing education and teaching experience. One solution is to create new degree programs targeted at post-secondary CS teaching. Here, we will focus on master's programs because of their shorter duration and increased accessibility to a more diverse set of candidates as well as the increasing acceptance of master's degrees for teaching-track positions. To the knowledge of the discussion leaders, no such program currently exists. This BOF will enable a discussion of how to design such a master's program, including topics such as program type, curriculum choices, admissions, and implementation - how to blend CS subject matter and pedagogical expertise with practical experience to meet the specific needs of post-secondary CS teachers.

Undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants (TAs) play a pivotal role in supporting student learning. TAs perform various duties, including grading, facilitating labs and tutorials, supporting collaboration projects, and, in some cases, designing course materials. TAs often receive training to enhance their technical skills but, more recently, some TA training programs have begun to recognize and emphasize the need for skills that help TAs foster inclusive learning spaces. Because TAs often have more opportunities to interact directly with students and hold dual identities as students and teachers in the same community, how they address and mitigate non-inclusive behavior may be different than how faculty would. While some TAs are beginning to receive training on concepts like self-efficacy, growth mindset, equity, inclusion, and bias, our community needs a deeper understanding of what skills TAs need to cultivate inclusive spaces and how these skills can be developed and evaluated within the constraints of the teaching term. In this BOF, we will discuss the skills and competencies that faculty and TAs believe are essential for helping TAs foster inclusive learning spaces, how to teach those skills and competencies in TA training programs, and how to evaluate the effectiveness of those programs.

"The only thing that scales with undergrads is undergrads". As Computer Science course enrollments have grown, there has been a necessary increase in the number of undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants (TAs, and UTAs). TA duties often extend far beyond grading, including designing and leading lab or recitation sections, holding office hours and creating assignments. Though advanced students, TAs need proper pedagogical training to be the most effective in their roles. Training strategies have widely varied from no training at all, to semester-long prep courses. We will explore the challenges of TA training across both large and small departments. While much of the effort has focused on teams of undergraduates, most presenters have used the same tools and strategies with their graduate students. Training for TAs should not just include the mechanics of managing a classroom, but culturally relevant pedagogy. The panel will focus on the challenges of providing "just in time", and how we manage both intra-course training and department or campus led courses.

Cache memories form a core topic in computer organization, computer architecture, and operating systems courses that is fundamentally important for understanding the source of and how to mitigate memory latencies in programs. This topic is difficult to teach due to the significant amount of terminology and interacting design parameters and policies. Simulators have been used as a valuable pedagogical tool for visualizing the changes in cache state due to memory accesses; for educational purposes, there are three varieties: command-line, GUI, and online. Command-line simulators tend to have limited visual output and require recompilation. GUI simulators are more visual but require downloading and installation. Online simulators are easily accessible but have the fewest features. We introduce the UW CSE351 Cache Simulator, an interactive, web-based tool that lets users observe the processes and study the fundamental concepts and policies of caching. It is implemented in p5.js, a JavaScript library, and is based on CAMERA, but improves upon the functionality and usability in a number of ways, including web access, a single interface instead of multiple workbenches, the ability to change cache policies (e.g., write and replacement), and a navigable access history. Attendees will be provided a handout with a feature list, references to other cache simulators/visualizers for educational purposes, and example student activities and exercises that use the UW CSE351 Cache Simulator.

As Computer Science undergraduate programs continue to increase in response to the still-unmet student demand, one growing trend is to engage current students as instructors of record, allowing for increases in course offerings and/or enrollments and giving these students extraordinary experiences in teaching. More and more programs are attempting to create sustainable and beneficial positions for student instructors as a way to handle current teaching needs as well as develop the next wave of teaching-track faculty. This BOF will enable a discussion of the why and how programs choose to engage students as instructors, including challenges, best practices, lessons learned, and tips for starting such a program. The discussion leaders can offer perspectives from differing approaches including student population (undergraduate vs. graduate), teaching context (summer vs. non-summer term, solo vs. shared teaching models), and support structures (administrative, mentorship, training) and will have former student teachers from their institutions participate in the small group discussions to reflect upon their experiences.

"The only thing that scales with undergrads is undergrads". As Computer Science course enrollments have grown, there has been a necessary increase in the number of undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants (TAs, and UTAs). TA duties often extend far beyond grading, including designing and leading lab or recitation sections, holding office hours and creating assignments. Though advanced students, TAs need proper pedagogical training to be the most effective in their roles. Training strategies have widely varied from no training at all, to semester-long prep courses. We will explore the challenges of TA training across both large and small departments. While much of the effort has focused on teams of undergraduates, most presenters have used the same tools and strategies with their graduate students. Training for TAs should not just include the mechanics of managing a classroom, but culturally relevant pedagogy. The panel will focus on the challenges of providing "just in time", and how we manage both intra-course training and department or campus led courses.

Efforts to engineer synthetic gene networks that spontaneously produce patterning in multicellular ensembles have focused on Turing's original model and the "activator-inhibitor" models of Meinhardt and Gierer. Systems based on this model are notoriously difficult to engineer. We present the first demonstration that Turing pattern formation can arise in a new family of oscillator-driven gene network topologies, specifically when a second feedback loop is introduced which quenches oscillations and incorporates a diffusible molecule. We provide an analysis of the system that predicts the range of kinetic parameters over which patterning should emerge and demonstrate the system's viability using stochastic simulations of a field of cells using realistic parameters. The primary goal of this paper is to provide a circuit architecture which can be implemented with relative ease by practitioners and which could serve as a model system for pattern generation in synthetic multicellular systems. Given the wide range of oscillatory circuits in natural systems, our system supports the tantalizing possibility that Turing pattern formation in natural multicellular systems can arise from oscillator-driven mechanisms.