This lightning talk describes the current effort and status to create recommended curriculum competencies for undergraduate data science programs. In 2023, the ACM Education Board established and chartered a task force to extend the ACM Computing Competencies for Undergraduate Data Science Curricula by producing a multidisciplinary set of competencies for data science with representatives from computing, statistics, and applied mathematics societies. ACM published guidelines in 2021 for delivering appropriate computing competencies in data science programs while acknowledging that computing is one major component of data science, along with mathematics and statistics, along with other components. The ACM Education Board recognized the need to expand on this work and invited participation from numerous statistics and mathematics societies to create a more complete set of guidelines. To that end, the American Statistical Association (ASA), the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) joined the ACM to form a joint task force that would expand on the computing elements and add other appropriate components. This lightning talk will present the status of that effort and provide a means to solicit feedback and input on this process. This session should interest all SIGCSE attendees, especially those developing curricula in Data Science.

The educational focus in Software Engineering and Computer Science has traditionally been on the theoretical aspects of computation, problem-solving algorithms, and coding skills. Accreditation standards and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) curriculum are designed to prepare students for careers and graduate school. Nevertheless, the majority of graduates engage in technical occupations where they become integral members of teams developing software products or services, requiring a diverse skillset including software de-sign, human-computer interaction, problem-solving methodolo-gies, and software testing, to deliver customer-oriented solutions within specified time and budget constraints. The gap between the skills acquired in academia and those demanded by the industry has given rise to a need for a different software engineering education. To address this need, in 2020, the Computer Science (CS) de-partment at Northern Kentucky University (NKU) launched the Applied Software Engineering (ASE) program, curated to meet industry demands and diversify the appeal of computer science to traditionally underrepresented demographics. The program was designed by faculty members with industry backgrounds and co-designed with the help of alumni and local industry leaders. Since 2020, the program has attracted an array of new and returning students with degrees in disciplines beyond software engineering, leading to a significant increase in enrollment from 6 to 53 students. In this work-in-progress paper, we detail the structure of the program and the elements that incorporate novel and high-impact practices in computing education and, specifically, software engineering to share our approach and invite feedback and comments that can help us measure and improve its success.

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents the experiences and lessons learned from five programs that provide financial awards and a holistic student support structure to low-income, academically talented students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). This report synthesizes the experiences of a diverse set of institutions, both public and private, that vary in size and geographic location. We have experience supporting students from a range of disciplines with an emphasis on students studying Computer Science. The goals of this work are to (1) outline the decisions that must be considered when designing a financial award program; (2) describe the interventions we have implemented and underline the institutional contexts that have led to their success; (3) describe the unique challenges posed by the COVID pandemic; and (4) highlight key elements necessary for successful program implementation. We specifically discuss the challenges we have encountered when implementing existing best practices. We report observations and results, some of which buttress those reported in the literature. Our work is intended to serve as a guide for educators who wish to implement programs to support students from financially disadvantaged and/or historically marginalized groups. By sharing our experiences and pain points, we hope to make it easier for them to design and implement effective programs adapted to their institutional needs and contexts.

In this session, members of the ACM Data Science (DS) Task Force will present the final draft of Computing Competencies for Undergraduate Data Science Programs. Drafting this document has been a three-year process, in which the task force has released preliminary drafts, sought input from the community, and responded to the community's helpful feedback. Our intent is that the session be an exchange that will clarify the contents of the report and provide participants with ways to put the report into practice at their own institutions. This session should be of interest to all SIGCSE attendees, but especially to faculty developing college-level curricula in Data Science.

Declaring a computer science (CS) major at the outset of college and going on to earn a computing degree may be the most direct route to a career in computing, but it is certainly not the only pathway. However, much of the work on pathways to computing careers focuses on those who have taken this traditional route, while less attention has been paid to those who pursue alternative pathways into computing. Understanding alternative pathways into computing may be particularly important to discussions about diversity in the field, as some research has shown that women and underrepresented minority (URM) students who enroll in CS courses are more likely than men and other majority students to be non-computing majors and to take computing courses later in their academic careers. This panel will provide perspectives from individuals with expertise in several alternative pathways into computing, such as through coding boot camps, undecided students, community colleges, and retrained end-user programmers.

We describe and report on a study away course held in the spring of 2015 that brought computer science students from a Midwestern university to visit companies in the Bay Area in California as part of their study of agile software development. While it may be a sufficient goal to offer study away as an encouragement for future participation in study abroad programs, study away has benefits in and of itself. In actuality, study away can build students' self-confidence, aid them in being accepting of different ideas, and help them to understand a different area of the world. The class was offered as a 1-credit computer science course and students met weekly leading up to the trip, then once again after. The class included a one-week visit to the San Francisco area, with visits to two universities and five high-tech companies. Eight undergraduates and one post-baccalaureate participated at a cost of $1700 each. Students were required to submit a five-page paper and were separated into two teams to develop and present posters at the university's student research symposium. The course was a success due to the investment of the Chief Information Officer of the university, the Office of Education Abroad, the department of Computer Science, and academic advising. Students reported upon immediate return-then once again three months later-that their interest in computer science had increased, that they had gained an understanding of a different region of the United States and that they were more accepting of different ideas.

The "Girls on the Go: The Mobile Computing College Experience" is a residential summer camp whose aim is to encourage female high school students to attend college, to consider computer science as viable major, and to pursue computing related degrees. The camp content is designed primarily around a user-centered design process, with the students gaining experience in the development of a zoo-themed mobile app. In addition to technical experience, students participate in sessions that educate them on campus life, the admissions process, and more importantly, what a computing-related career may hold for them. The camp was offered in two consecutive summers, with approximately 20 participants in each iteration. In this paper, we compare differences between the two iterations with the intent of identifying both lessons learned and avenues for improving the experience. We investigate whether the camp had an effect on attitudes towards computer science as a major, and on the careers available to computer science graduates. To this end, our analysis revealed a statistically significant effect upon raising awareness of the role of computer scientists and the relevancy of computing for solving real world problems.

In this paper, we examine computational thinking and its connections to critical thinking from the perspective of in- formatics. We developed an introductory course for students in our College of Informatics, which includes majors rang- ing from journalism to computer science. The course cov- ered a set of principles of informatics, using both lectures and active learning sessions designed to develop informat- ics and computational thinking skills. The set of principles was drawn from a wide set of sources, and included broad principles like those of Denning and Loidl, as well as more limited principles related to topics like universal computa- tion and undecidability. We evaluated the change in both computational and critical thinking skills over the course of the semester, using a well-known validated critical thinking test and a computational thinking test of our own devising.

An early undergraduate research program for rising sophomores and juniors at risk of leaving STEM degree programs is described. Students are paid a stipend to work part-time, at a maximum of twenty hours per week, as part of a research team. Faculty researchers are not financially compensated for working with students. The program successfully brings together STEM departments to target students who are at risk of leaving their major. Initial results demonstrate a positive influence of undergraduate research in retaining STEM majors and improvements in Student Assessment of Learning Gains. Future work, including institutionalization of the project, is discussed.

In this paper, we describe our experience running "Girls on the Go: The Mobile Computing College Experience." We decided to do a residential summer camp for HS-age girls to achieve two goals: to encourage our campers to attend college and to interest them in computer science as a possible career option. We centered the camp around the design of a zoo-themed research tool where campers designed a mobile application to be used by researchers to document and study animal behavior. Post-camp surveys gave statistically significant results indicating that the camp increased the girls' confidence in performing computer science and understanding what computer scientists did.

The ACM's “Computer Science Curriculum 2008: An Interim Revision of CS 2001” suggests 31 core hours of Software Engineering covering the standard phases of software development. At many universities, including ours, Software Engineering is a capstone course with a semester-long team project. While the course covers the software development lifecycle there is not enough time in a single semester for students to gain an appreciation for all phases, especially the importance of testing and documentation to the maintenance phase which is the longest phase in successful software projects. To address this, a new course, Software Maintenance and Testing, was added as a pre-requisite to Software Engineering. The course will be implemented in fall, 2011. Students will be surveyed to determine if their appreciation for different development models, documentation, recording of design decisions, and clean code are improved by maintaining code prior to developing a brand-new or greenfield project. A Likert scale instrument will be develop to evaluate students' attitudes. The research instrument will be tuned until validity and reliability are achieved. Preliminary and baseline results will be presented.

In an empirical study of fourteen widely used open source PHP Web applications, we found that the vulnerability density of the aggregate code base decreased from 8.88 vulnerabilities/KLOC to 3.30 from Summer 2006 to Summer 2008. Individual web applications varied widely, with vulnerability densities ranging from 0 to 121.4 at the beginning of the study. While the total number of security problems decreased, vulnerability density increased in eight of the fourteen applications over the analysis period. We developed a security resources indicator metric, which we found to be strongly correlated (rho = 0.67, p < 0.05) with change in vulnerability density over time. Traditional software metrics, such as code size, cyclomatic complexity, nesting complexity, and churn, had significant (p < 0.05) but much smaller correlations (rho = 0.31 at best) with vulnerability density. Vulnerability density was measured using the fortify source code analyzer static analysis tool.

In this paper, we describe projects that engage Hispanic middle-school age students with computing, and cast these projects within the ECC ("Engagement, Capacity, Continuity") framework. Our projects were undertaken in the Midwestern United States, where recent heavy immigration from Latin America has caused rapid demographic shifts. We have conducted computing workshops that are cognizant of the cultural milieu of recent immigrants, in that they are family-based, are offered at familiar sites in the community, and give participants a chance to be constructors of technology rather than mere "end-users." We present these efforts as forces that generate a flow that carries immigrant youths up to the point of beginning an undergraduate major in computing.