Background: Prior research argues that positive learning environments support student learning, belonging, and the desire to continue learning. In order to create joyful learning environments, we must first study what characterizes such learning spaces. However, prior research has not yet asked students what makes CS learning environments joyful. Objective: In this study, we sought to understand students’ joyful experiences in secondary CS classrooms and the elements of the learning environments that fostered those experiences. Method: We interviewed 8 students who had joyful CS experiences about those experiences, the environments in which they occured, and about the pedagogies their teachers used. We then interviewed 5 of their teachers to better understand the environments and pedagogies that cultivated joyful CS experiences. Findings: We found 4 elements in common in each student’s experience: teachers worked to relate to students, prioritize a relationship with learning, frame CS with purpose, and reify a joyful CS experience. Implications: These findings offer the opportunity for researchers and educators to reconsider pedagogies and design learning environments that engender joyful CS experiences for students. This will better enable students to build relationships with CS.

This Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session provides a space for LGBTQ+ educators, researchers, students, and allies to connect, share, and collaborate. It builds upon the strong foundation of previous successful BOFs focused on cultivating and sustaining the LGBTQ+ community (Kivuva et al., 2025) and the broad interest shown in panels on advancing LGBTQIA+ voices (DuBow et al., 2024). Recognizing the diverse needs within our community, this session is built around four concurrent, facilitated breakout groups, allowing attendees to self-select into the conversation most relevant to them. The importance of affinity spaces for ''gender-based community building'' and fostering a sense of belonging is a key aspect of broadening participation (Swackhamer et al., 2022). The session will begin with a collective welcome and introduction to ground us in a shared sense of community before self-selecting into roundtables. The four roundtable themes are: (1) An affinity space for sharing personal experiences from the past year; (2) Supporting LGBTQ+ students and building departmental community; (3) Advancing LGBTQ+-focused research in CS education; and (4) Professional development focused on grant writing and career advancement. This unique structure ensures that, whether attendees are seeking peer support, pedagogical strategies, research collaboration, or career mentorship, they will find a dedicated space. Participants will leave with new connections and targeted, actionable insights to support their personal and professional lives.

This Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session offers LGBTQ+ researchers, educators, and practitioners in computing education an inclusive space for community-building, advocacy, and creative expression. The session seeks to expand beyond traditional networking by offering attendees a variety of opt-in activities, such as fiber arts, crafting, media sharing, and Pittsburgh-themed games. Attendees will have the opportunity to decompress after a long conference day, participate in discussions on queer scholarship and activism, and explore ways to make computing education more inclusive to LGBTQ+ individuals.

Objectives: Assessments play a crucial role in computer science courses by providing insights into student learning. While previous research has explored various aspects of assessments, little attention has been given to assessment policies that instructors devise and their impact on students’ experiences. Our goal was to investigate: How do assessment policies shape marginalized students’ experiences in coding classes?Method: We conducted 19 semi-structured interviews with post-secondary students currently enrolled in or completed a class where their code was evaluated. To recruit, we primarily targeted students from underrepresented racial groups in computer science. Many of these students attended large 4-year public universities. During the interviews, we inquired about students’ experience with different assessment policies and how those policies affected their lives and experiences completing the assignments. Results: Our findings revealed ten distinct ways policy and students’ lives interacted to create or heighten inequities, which significantly shaped marginalized students’ lives. Many policies did not consider the unique experiences of their students and students’ needs. Additionally, due to unclear and strict policies, students experienced frustration, confusion, and demotivation, consequently diminishing their sense of belonging in computer science and weakening their self-efficacy as programmers. This reveals the negative consequences of poor assessment policy choices and provides insight into how assessment policies can create barriers to learning computer science for marginalized students.

Many computer science education efforts promise liberation and equality, but that promise often goes unfulfilled. Teaching computation through E-textiles has been one way to achieve this promise because it has increased student engagement and enabled identity work. Although some approaches to teaching CS through E-textiles have been demonstrated as effective, there is not yet work using a programmable electronic embroidery machine (computational embroidery), or work that makes culture itself a topic of learning. In a six-week summer school course, we explored this opportunity, teaching a culture-centric embroidery class that combined hand embroidery and computational embroidery. Students incorporated their identities into their projects by using a block-based coding language to create embroidered patterns. They enthusiastically engaged with the programming aspects of the course and sought to make complicated and beautiful work that interwove their diverse cultures and identities. This paper offers insights into what it is like to teach computing with a cultural lens. Our curriculum and pedagogy offer instructors a template to incorporate these technologies and topics into their courses.

This Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session will offer LGBTQ+ researchers and practitioners at SIGCSE TS a space for networking, sharing experiences, and being in community together. Given the consistent marginalization of the LGBTQ+ community, this BOF aims to create a community at SIGCSE of professors, students, researchers, and practitioners with interest in computing education. The BOF will provide a space for people to decompress from the long conference day through playing board games and socializing. There is also space for attendees to discuss ways computing education and SIGCSE could be more inclusive to the LGBTQ+ community.

Computing education research (CER) has used demographic data to understand learners’ identities, backgrounds, and contexts for efforts such as culturally-responsive computing. Prior work indicates that failing to elucidate and critically engage with the implicit assumptions of a field can unintentionally reinforce power structures that further marginalize people from non-dominant groups. The goal of this paper is two-fold: to understand what populations CER researchers have studied, and to surface implicit assumptions about how researchers have collected, reported, and used demographic data on these populations. We conducted a content analysis of 510 peer-reviewed papers published in 12 CER venues from 2012 to 2021. We found that (1) 60% of papers studied older learners in formal contexts (i.e. post-secondary education); (2) 68% of papers left unclear how researchers collected demographic data; and (3) while 94% of papers were single-site studies, only 14% addressed the limitations of their contexts. We also identified hegemonic norms through ambiguous aggregate term usage (e.g. underrepresented, diverse) in 23% of papers, and through incomplete reporting of demographics (i.e. leaving out demographics for some participants in their sample) in 35% of papers. We discuss the implications of these findings for the CER field, raising considerations for CER researchers to keep in mind when collecting, reporting, and using demographic data.

Part of broadening participation in computer science (CS) is understanding what experiences and identities students bring with them to the classroom and building upon them. Prior work has often achieved this by connecting CS concepts to cultural ideas and practices. Increasingly, however, youth may be encountering sociotechnical and sociopolitical counternarratives about computing, power, and justice, offering new opportunities to connect CS to students' lives. To understand what role these emerging counternarratives have in secondary CS classrooms, we taught a co-constructed high school course to a racially, ethnically, socioeconomically, and gender diverse classroom, framing the course as both a creative and critical introduction to CS, giving agency to students to incorporate critical themes into their learning. We gathered notes, artifacts, and student responses over the course of 6-weeks, and analyzed the extent to which students brought critical themes into their creative work, developing critical consciousness of CS concepts. We found that before there was space for critical conversations about computing, we had to navigate students' issues of trust, positionality, and the broader inequitable systems of education in which the class occurred. Only after navigating those tensions did students feel safe to have those critical conversations. Once they did, they rapidly embraced the counternarratives, structured their learning around them, and used them to build community and support each other.