Internship experiences are valuable components of undergraduate computing programs, offering students the chance to apply classroom knowledge and skills in a real-world setting. In evaluating the computing curricula, an important question arises about which courses have the greatest impact on students' preparedness for internships. Interested in getting student perceptions of course impact, we required students at our institution who completed computing internships, to submit a reflection paper which included a prompt about which courses they found most beneficial during their internship experience. These reflections were analyzed by tracking the frequency of specific course mentions and identifying common themes across responses. This work's purpose was to determine how we could adjust our CS course content, sequences, and requirements to better serve students prior to them attaining internships. The findings revealed that while students saw value in nearly every course within the computing curriculum, certain courses stood out as being especially impactful.

This work provides a detailed account of a mentoring program pairing junior and senior CS and math undergraduate majors with Industry professionals. Developed with the support of a National Science Foundation S-STEM grant, our Industry Mentor program served high financial needs students, many of whom were first generation college students and/or from groups underrepresented amongst CS or mathematics majors. We present the design of our Industry Mentor program as a whole, as well as our matching process, which was developed in consultation with mentoring experts and applicable literature. The original motivation and objectives for the program, as well as reflections and initial analysis are also shared to provide context and potential claims of impact. Findings contribute to the knowledge base of effective practices for promoting retention, graduation, and career awareness of students in computing and mathematics.

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 (most related to the COVID-19 pandemic) that didn't go as planned. Each contributor will describe their "good idea", the situation that resulted, and wider lessons for the CS community.

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.

This lightning talk describes the use of escape rooms in Computer Science and Mathematics education. Escape rooms are games where players work collaboratively to solve a series of puzzles in order to achieve a goal within a limited time frame. Student created escape room puzzles are a novel way for students to foster and demonstrate their knowledge through non-traditional methods. This activity can be used in courses across the CS curriculum as well as in K-12 education. Students enjoy building the escape rooms, so they don't consider it a formal assessment and it promotes creativity and teamwork skills. Our presentation will cover the key elements in this process from formation of groups to acquiring traditional escape room elements as well as other resources that students use to create the puzzles. We will also discuss how we familiarized the students with escape rooms before the activity. We will give examples of some of the puzzles created by our CS students that included the history of computing, tracing computer code, designing algorithms, solving logic problems, binary numbers, decoding ASCII codes, encryption and sequence and series problems.