Women and individuals from underrepresented groups are significantly underrepresented in educational pathways and professional roles in computing. This imbalance not only reveals broader social inequities but also alters the viewpoints of both current and future technologists. These perspectives can lead to a lack of motivation or self-efficacy in academia and implicit hiring and algorithmic biases in the professional world [22][18][13].

Debugging is a crucial skill for any new programmer to learn. Writing AND debugging code can be too challenging for students, so this assignment seeks to make the debugger more approachable by using it as a terminal-based debugging game. The ''game'' is a simulation of a Clue-style Murder Mystery story, which is completely randomized based on each student's login ID. The MurderMystery driver will run the simulation, and then ask students a series of questions about the events of the simulation. Students can answer these via the terminal, and then submit the auto-generated Answers file to be auto-graded by the GameResults auto-grader. The questions range in type and scope, requiring anything from a single normal breakpoint, up to four conditional breakpoints to answer. The students must use the variable viewer in the debugger to inspect nested object structures and access certain coordinates of 2D arrays. Since each student's mystery is randomized, it required a slightly different approach for everyone, while still sharing similar tactics. By introducing the debugger in this way, students can approach the task as a game to be solved, with lower stakes than if they were trying to fix their own code. While still providing familiarity with the debugger, boolean conditions, simple object structures, and more.

The Infinity War assignment tests the comprehension of the graph data structure in a context based on Avengers: Infinity War. The assignment has various tasks, where each task focuses on a specific aspect of a graph, and makes connections to the movie as well as other fields such as Physics, Neuroscience, and Philosophy in a creative manner. The assignment tests graph manipulation, connectedness, search, recursion, cycles, and other topics, where each task focuses on one of these topics. Furthermore, the assignment is meant for CS2 students, takes around 1-2 weeks to complete, and has a mix of easier and harder tasks. The student handout, starter code, and a website containing the metadata of the assignment are provided.

Computer science universities and colleges around the nation are experiencing large growth in enrollments. To maintain in-person interaction with students, large courses typically include multiple recitations, each led by a Teaching Assistant (TA). Students in each group struggle with various course content, and these weaknesses are best evaluated by the TAs working closely with the students. TAs, however, have only a superficial understanding of education theory, and instructors must closely monitor and evaluate the content of recitations. Existing instruction management systems can be used to organize course-wide content, but, to our knowledge, none of them operate at the granularity of recitations. This poster presents Dynamic Recitation, an open-source platform through which TAs and instructors can create and share practice problems and lesson plans tagged with the learning objectives that they cover. The poster illustrates the interface offered to the TAs for creating problems, designing lesson plans for individual sections, and submitting feedback about student progress. It shows examples of lesson plans created in the system, as well as reports that can be used to identify elements that promote desired learning objectives and refine recitations.

Storage servers consume significant amounts of energy and are highly non-energy-proportional. Fortunately, researchers have proposed disks that adjust their rotation speeds based on utilization. However, these disks either pose significant engineering challenges (by having too many speeds) or adjust behavior only at a coarse grain (by having just two speeds). In this paper, we propose LogStore, a storage system that enables two-speed disks to achieve substantially increased energy proportionality and, consequently, lower energy consumption. Our evaluation with real I/O workloads shows that LogStore can decrease energy consumption significantly, even for very tightly provisioned servers, with a negligible impact on aggregate throughput.

Power densities have been increasing rapidly at all levels of server systems. To counter the high temperatures resulting from these densities, systems researchers have recently started work on softwarebased thermal management. Unfortunately, research in this new area has been hindered by the limitations imposed by simulators and real measurements. In this paper, we introduce Mercury, a software suite that avoids these limitations by accurately emulating temperatures based on simple layout, hardware, and componentutilization data. Most importantly, Mercury runs the entire software stack natively, enables repeatable experiments, and allows the study of thermal emergencies without harming hardware reliability. We validate Mercury using real measurements and a widely used commercial simulator. We use Mercury to develop Freon, a system that manages thermal emergencies in a server cluster without unnecessary performance degradation. Mercury will soon become available from http://www.darklab.rutgers.edu.