The computer science education community has created many adaptive feedback tools and intelligent tutoring systems to improve students' experience in computing-related courses. However, the extent to which these systems-which we collectively refer to as adaptive pedagogical systems-support equitable outcomes for learners of all genders and racial identities is not known. We conducted a systematic literature review of SIGCSE, ITiCSE, and ICER publications on adaptive pedagogical systems in computing courses from the last five years. The results reveal that not only is there little to no data on the effectiveness of adaptive pedagogical systems for CS education by gender or race, the vast majority of published papers reporting on these systems do not even include the demographics of their users. Based on these findings, this position paper makes a call to action: we must include the voices of historically marginalized students in the design and evaluation of our software, lest we continue to perpetuate that marginalization. We highlight key ideas that every CS education researcher should consider when designing and evaluating technologies to support learners. We argue that this community must hold ourselves and each other accountable to create technologies that support learners equitably.

The computer science education community strives to improve equity and representation within the field, yet the proportion of women earning CS bachelor's degrees in countries such as the US remains low. In addition to recruitment and retention initiatives that support women, we need to better understand women's experiences within CS. This paper makes a novel contribution toward this effort by examining women's self-reported stress during remote collaborative programming with a peer. Women reported significantly more stress than men, so we analyzed the women's collaborative dialogues and identified the most common dialogue acts and sequences of dialogue acts. We used these dialogue acts to predict women's stress and found six significant patterns of dialogue. Women reported less stress with higher frequencies of offering suggestions, having their partner provide explanations, and having their own rapport-building messages reciprocated by their partner. In contrast, women reported more stress with higher frequencies of their own explanations, having their partner answer their questions, and having their partner send a rapport-building message that they reciprocated. Understanding the nuances of these experiences allows us to make better predictions of when women might be feeling stressed and what we might be able to do to relieve these feelings. Improving women's CS experiences holds the potential to, in turn, improve gender equity within CS.

The computer science education community has long strived to create more equitable opportunities for students, such as initiatives to foster inclusion of women and other people from historically marginalized groups in CS. Despite these efforts, the gender gap has persisted, with less than a quarter of CS Bachelor's degrees awarded to women in the United States in 2019. As a community, we must strive to improve women's experiences in CS. This paper describes work conducted at a large research university which has traditionally offered CS1 through lecture sections ranging in size from 400-650 students. In Fall 2019, we offered an alternative small all-women's class (35 students) in addition to the traditional lecture class (601 students; 149 women). Both classes covered the same CS concepts but were led by different instructors. Students reported on their experience through a survey administered at the end of the semester. Students in the all-women's class reported significantly greater social connections and comfort collaborating with their peers compared to women in the traditional class. They also reported significantly greater feelings of support within their class, more confidence in their CS knowledge, and a more welcoming classroom environment compared to women in the traditional class. Additionally, the drop rate for students in the all-women's class was significantly lower (5.7%) than the drop rate for women in the traditional class (24.8%). In light of these positive results, we provide actionable insights for CS educators and discuss how to better support women in their CS endeavors.

Learning computer science presents many challenges to students, and providing resources for meaningful practice is recognized as a way to support rigorous learning and diverse student participation. At the same time, mobile phones are increasingly ubiquitous, creating an underutilized opportunity for practice outside of traditional methods. This experience report presents a user-centered approach to designing a practice app for introductory Java. We investigated user preferences through a series of small studies, first conducting think-aloud sessions and focus groups, and finally conducting a usability study comparing two prototype versions. The initial studies suggested how to leverage the affordances of small screens, ruling out free-response practice problems in favor of either fill-in-the-blank (FB) or multiple-choice (MC) questions. The comparison study revealed statistically significant differences in students' survey responses: (1) usability scores were significantly higher for the MC version than the FB version; (2) students reported significantly greater satisfaction and desire to learn for the MC version; and (3) students reported enjoying and being more comfortable with the MC version compared to the FB version. We contextualize this observation within related research on question formats. Takeaways from this experience report can provide guidance on designing mobile applications that give students opportunities for meaningful practice.

In recent years, remote collaboration has become increasingly common both in the workplace and in the classroom. It is imperative that we understand and support remote collaborative problem solving, particularly understanding the experiences of people from historically marginalized groups whose intellectual contributions are essential for addressing the pressing needs society faces. This paper reports on a study in which 58 introductory computer science students constructed code remotely with a partner following either predefined structured roles (driver and navigator in pair programming) or without predefined structured roles. Between the structured-role and unstructured-role conditions, participants? normalized learning gain, Intrinsic Motivation Inventory scores, and system usability scores were not significantly different. However, regardless of the collaboration condition, women reported significantly higher levels of stress, lower levels of perceived competence, and less perceived choice compared to men. Because computer science is a context in which women have been historically marginalized, we next examined the relationship between student gender and collaborative dialogues by extracting lexical and sentiment features from the textual messages partners exchanged. Results reveal that dialogue features, such as number of utterances, utterance length, and partner sentiment, significantly correlated with women's reports of stress, perceived competence, or perceived choice. These findings provide insight on women's experiences in remote programming, suggest that dialogue features can predict their collaborative experiences, and hold implications for designing systems that help provide collaborative experiences in which everyone can thrive.

Women continue to be underrepresented in computer science. Previous research has identified factors that contribute to women's decisions to pursue computing-related majors, but in order to truly address the problem of underrepresentation, we need to develop a deeper understanding of women's experiences within computer science courses. Pair programming is demonstrably beneficial in many ways, and we hypothesize that there are gender differences in student perceptions of this widely used collaboration framework. To explore these differences and move toward a thorough understanding of students' experiences, this paper investigates students' written responses about their experiences with pair programming in a university-level introductory computer science course. Using thematic analysis, we identified overarching themes and distinguished between what men and women reported. Both women and men wrote about their overwhelmingly positive perceptions of pair programming. Women often mentioned that pair programming helps with engagement, feeling less frustrated, building confidence, and making friends. Women also noted that it is easier to learn from peers. These findings shed light on how pair programming may lower barriers to women's participation and retention in computing and inform ongoing efforts to create more inclusive spaces in computing education.

The K-12 Computer Science Framework has established that students should be learning about the computer science concept of variables as early as middle school, although the field has not yet determined how this and other related concepts should be introduced. Secondary school computer science curricula such as Exploring CS and AP CS Principles often teach the concept of variables in the context of algebra, which most students have already encountered in their mathematics courses. However, when strategizing how to introduce the concept at the middle school level, we confront the reality that many middle schoolers have not yet learned algebra. With that challenge in mind, this position paper makes a case for introducing the concept of variables in the context of middle school science. In addition to an analysis of existing curricula, the paper includes discussion of a day-long pilot study and the consequent teacher feedback that further supports the approach. The CS For All initiative has increased interest in bringing computer science to middle school classrooms; this paper makes an argument for doing so in a way that can benefit students' learning of both computer science and core science content.