Promptly and properly addressing students' help requests during office hours is a critical challenge for large CS courses. With a large number of help requests, the queue gets longer and students have to endure long wait times. To address this problem, we try to quantify students' patience in the queue through survival analysis. Our results show that half of the students are willing to stay in the queue after waiting for 142.5 minutes. Moreover, we find that female students, morning requests, returning students, and requests about test failures are more likely to stay in the queue for a longer time.

Conference presentations usually focus on successful innovations: new ideas that yield significant improvements to current practice. Yet we often learn more from failure than from success. In this panel, we present five case studies of "good ideas" for improving CS education that didn't go as planned, related to offering additional help to students. Each contributor will describe their "good idea," the situation that resulted, and wider lessons for the CS community.

CS courses often use a variety of learning activities to assist students while learning concepts. These activities' levels of engagement can be categorized through the ICAP framework as Interactive, Constructive, Active, and Passive respectfully. For this work, we categorize learning activities from an online professional development course and analyzed the probabilities of transitioning between ICAP modalities on a week-by-week basis. This poster presents our analysis on which ICAP modes students visited during each week of the course. We found the majority of students would review Passive materials before Interactive activities, then repeating this process. The second most common transition followed the ICAP Framework, selecting activities with increasing levels of engagement. Contrary to our assumptions, students primarily worked on 'new' materials, rather than 'review' previous activities.

The COVID-19 pandemic shifted many U.S. schools from in-person to remote instruction. While collaborative CS activities had become increasingly common in classrooms prior to the pandemic, the sudden shift to remote learning presented challenges for both teachers and students in implementing and supporting collaborative learning. Though some research on remote collaborative CS learning has been conducted with adult learners, less has been done with younger learners such as elementary school students. This experience report describes lessons learned from a remote after-school camp with 24 elementary school students who participated in a series of individual and paired learning activities over three weeks. We describe the design of the learning activities, participant recruitment, group formation, and data collection process. We also provide practical implications for implementation such as how to guide facilitators, pair students, and calibrate task difficulty to foster collaboration. This experience report contributes to the understanding of remote CS learning practices, particularly for elementary school students, and we hope it will provoke methodological advancement in this important area.

A significant issue Computer Science students face are syntax errors. This poster presents two studies on the use of typing exercises. In a usability and interaction study, 14 students were asked to complete typing, fill in the blank, and self-explanation style exercises. Fill in the blank were similar to typing exercises with 1 line of code omitted. Self-explanation exercises were graded on whether the student could adequately describe how the source code of a program worked. Students with "Poor"-labeled self-explanations experienced more typing errors and took more time completing exercises. In a semester-long study, 99 students in a CS2 course completed 538 submissions of 66 weekly typing exercises. Students were divided into four categories: users that joined but never used the platform, users that barely used the platform, regular viewers of exercises, and regular completers of exercises. Regular completers earned a minimum final letter grade of a B, compared to 90% regular viewers, 76% from barely used, and 81% from never used. Regular completers were not simply high performing students that did additional work, as 40% of regular completers scored a C or lower on the course's first midterm exam. Based on these findings, students who used the system performed similarly or better than students who did not. While not the only source of practice, typing exercises (and other novel exercises) can serve as a viable tool for teaching Computer Science and boosting low-performing students' abilities.