This research-to-practice WIP paper describes an approach to engage high school students in research through the utilization of citizen science tools embedded with Machine Learning (ML) models. In the context of fostering early engagement in scientific research among high school students, this paper explores the integration of citizen science and ML using SmartCS, an existing platform for creating citizen science smartphone applications. The process requires no prior programming knowledge, making it accessible to a broad range of students. For our approach, a group of high school students participated in a two-month-long summer research program, where they were introduced to the principles of citizen science as a method for data collection across diverse scientific projects from different research domains. The program's initial task involved students in the conceptualization of a citizen science project, adopted based on a thorough literature review, followed by the practical task of developing a smartphone application for data collection and educational purposes. Students either created new datasets or curated existing ones to train lightweight ML models for computer vision tasks, specifically focused on providing visual guidance within these mobile apps. The final task involved deploying these applications for public use and collecting user feedback. Our experience suggests that this approach not only enabled students to learn aspects of computer science and engineering, particularly in the area of ML model training and mobile application software development, but also allowed them to experience firsthand the significant role citizen science can play in collecting and analyzing scientific data.

This Innovative Practice Work in Progress paper reports on a pilot program to support HBCU undergraduates in learning about open source software contribution. Offered in the Summer of 2023, this program was called Contributor Catalyst. This program was designed to support students who had completed foundational computing coursework (i.e. intro-ductory programming, data structures), but were still evaluating future education and career pathways. We served four HBCU undergraduates from the same institution in our pilot year. The program offered mentorship, instruction, and community-building through a hybrid-modality cohort model, in which students spent one week learning remotely, four weeks together in-person on an Rl residential campus, and then three more weeks collaborating remotely. Roughly the first half of the program was spent learning about open source tools, practices, and norms; the second half was spent contributing to p5js, a real world project which the students chose from a vetted list of options. Community-building events were highlighted during the in-person portion of the program, for example: welcome and departure dinners, regional excursions, and participating in a Black Lives Matter garden workday. Students also participated in professional development such as attending an academic research conference and visiting a tech company. Student learning was scaffolded by workshop-style instruction and was further supported by a layered community of practice. This community of practice included peer support from within the cohort, program support from their instructor, and project support from p5js community members. Students also had many opportunities to engage with guests including project maintainers, faculty members, and industry professionals, all working in the realm of open source. This paper offers an early report on our experiences and suggests how the program might evolve and grow in future years. In particular, we hope to build partnerships with additional HB-CUs, document and share our program resources, and evaluate programmatic goals.

We designed the LilyTiny sewable microcontroller over ten years ago in an effort to make electronic textiles more accessible to students, educators, and novices; it was meant to be affordable, easy to get started with, and well-supported by curriculum. We also designed the LilyTiny with hopes of helping to bridge the gap between e-textile activities using only lights and batteries – and those requiring knowledge of Arduino programming. Following its pilot, the LilyTiny was released as a commercial product through SparkFun Electronics, costing about $5 (USD) and shipping pre-programmed to control various LED behaviors. Free curriculum was released alongside it, detailing six low-cost activities that could be taught without any prior electronics experience.

This Innovative Practice Work in Progress paper reports on our experience scaffolding student success in the uncertain landscape of open source. Following participation in a faculty workshop on the subject, the first author spent two consecutive terms developing, teaching, and revising an upper-division open source software course. The difference between the two course offerings was astounding; students enrolled in the second iteration made more successful project contributions, spent more of their own time working outside of class, and felt a greater connection to both the project and the developer community of which they were a part. We detail our experiences here, with particular focus on the importance of project selection - as well as the revisions we believe to be most responsible for improvement: additional mentorship, supplemental in-class tutorials, more dedicated class time for teamwork, intentional team groupings, and access to large screens for collaboration.

In this Innovative Practice Full Paper, we report on a CS0-level computational craft course added to our departmental offerings in hopes of further broadening participation. We summarize the course design and structure, which emphasize algorithmic design (using Processing), handcraft, and digital fabrication. We share examples of creative computational work and feedback from students, as well as reflections on the course's efficacy within our funnel-style curriculum. Early evidence suggests that the course offers a highly personal and creative entry point to computing – and one that is effective at engaging a diversity of students while ensuring a smooth transition to CS1.

Encountering failure while cultivating computational literacy is inevitable, as debugging is a normal and necessary part of any programmer's workflow. Unfortunately, internalization of this failure is one discouraging factor in many students' choice not to pursue computer science. In this proposal, I outline my dissertation research on constructive mindsets for overcoming failure in introductory programming contexts. This work is motivated by an overarching interest in broadening participation in computing -- and, in particular, attracting and retaining more female computer science students. My doctoral research examines the differences in how technical students and non-technical students approach learning to code, with the goal of generating best practices for other educators.

LilyPond is a new online community that enables people to document, share and browse e-textile projects---projects that blend electronics, computation and textiles. It was designed to be a project repository and a community gathering place for students, educators, and hobbyists who are creating e-textiles. In this paper, we describe the developing website and its user community. We examine the demographics of this community, its patterns of site usage and its emerging tastes and preferences.

This paper presents an e-sewing tutorial that details how to sew circuits into fabric. The tutorials are intended for an audience of young adults without access to workshops or classroom activities on this topic. Development of the tutorials was motivated by the emergence of online learning as a useful educational pathway for students. We reflect upon our introductory explorations with self-motivated learners and how these explorations may inform future development of online support materials.

The Living Wall project explores the construction and application of interactive wallpaper. Using conductive, resistive, and magnetic paints we produced wallpaper that enables us to create dynamic, reconfigurable, programmable spaces. The wallpaper consists of circuitry that is painted onto a sheet of paper and a set of electronic modules that are attached to it with magnets. The wallpaper can be used for a multitude of functional and fanciful applications involving lighting, environmental sensing, appliance control, and ambient information display.