The popularity of autograding has grown due to increasing class sizes and the need to reduce grading load while ensuring quality. Autograding has conventionally been used for multiple choice and fill in the blank questions, or to check code correctness. In this work, we discuss the use of autograders at UBC and some non-conventional autograding implementations in our curricula. We reflect upon our autograder use in our courses and discuss the benefits, implications, and considerations of this pedagogical choice.

Computer science students regularly produce technical writing, whether it's commit messages; issues, feature requests or bug reports; user- or developer-facing documentation; research papers; reports; or other forms of writing. Post-secondary educators have published papers about curriculum and course designs that teach technical writing and other communicative skills but little work has investigated computer science students' perspectives on what technical writing skills they are learning, how they are learning them, and how they are experiencing this learning. In this lightning talk, we will provide an overview of a semester-long qualitative interview and reflective journaling study that we are conducting with upper-year computer science students to learn about their experiences, attitudes, and beliefs related to learning technical writing. We aim to answer two research questions 1) How do University of British Columbia computer science undergraduate students describe their technical writing experiences? What are their reflections on these experiences? and 2) What are University of British Columbia computer science undergraduate students' attitudes and beliefs about learning how to write technical documents in computer science courses? We will analyze the data and construct themes via Braun and Clarke's method of reflexive thematic analysis and hope that what we generate will impact the teaching and learning of technical writing in computer science. Through this lightning talk we will share our preliminary findings and aim to connect with collaborators who share interests in studying computer science students' learning of technical writing.

English-language universities are increasingly recruiting students who are English Language Learners (ELL), but in computer science little is known about whether or how their learning needs differ from native English speakers. Despite widespread efforts into broadening participation in computing, computer science education for ELL students who are learning computer science in English is relatively understudied. In this paper, we review the small but growing body of work in this area. We conducted a scoping review to identify 54 relevant publications and chart their commonalities. We then performed a qualitative analysis to identify meta- and sub-themes. The meta-themes include: studying what benefits or hinders ELL students, focusing on integrative language skills, and pedagogical and curricular approaches. Via this scoping review, we provide a summary and synthesis of the 54 publications and identify comprehensively-examined and emerging themes.

In many post-secondary institutions, English is the language of instruction in computer science, but our students may not be fluent in English. I am interested in exploring the pedagogical and curricular practices that computer science faculty members use when teaching students who are English Language Learners (ELL) and do not have a common native language. Identifying effective strategies for ELL students is one piece of creating an inclusive classroom. Inclusive teaching provides an accessible learning environment for all students. Universal Design for Learning is a framework that provides principles and guidelines which enable educators to create inclusive and accessible courses. Evidence suggests that strategies that remove barriers for a group of students also improve learning for all. I hypothesize that strategies that are effective for ELL students will also make computer science more accessible and inclusive for the entire student body. As the first step in this research, I intend to survey Canadian teaching-focused faculty members to investigate which teaching strategies they use, whether they think these strategies are effective for ELL students, and whether they think those strategies are inclusive.

In this workshop, we as a group use Appreciative Inquiry (AI) techniques to explore and develop our strengths as CS educators. As a participant, you will gain appreciation for your strengths as an educator, with concrete plans for building on these strengths. You will also learn about AI as a qualitative research methodology that is complementary to more common CS research methodologies, and that you can apply to evaluate and improve your own educational practice. Appreciative Inquiry drives change by building on what's already working well in an organization. Similarly to other qualitative methods, AI generates rich, deep feedback that is grounded in stakeholders' experiences, but in contrast to other methods its focus on strengths and positives surfaces unique, strength-based findings and make it an energizing and fulfilling approach to professional development and the scholarship of teaching and learning. AI is commonly used in education and organizational research and is an effective and community-building way to drive organizational or program change and positively impact participants' morale. We will share our materials and key tips to enable you to apply Appreciative Inquiry in your own work. You may wish to run Appreciative Inquiry workshops with students as an evaluation method, or run them with colleagues for professional development or for promoting positive change in your unit or program, or take smaller steps integrating the appreciative mindset into your teaching or other professional work.

Demand for computing courses from students in disciplines outside of Computer Science is growing. This growth has created increasing challenges in offering one-size-fits-all CS1 courses. We found that non-CS majors' experiences and outcomes in our existing CS1 course were worse than those of intended CS majors. In response, we developed an introductory programming course, CS0.5, aimed at meeting the needs of the diverse population of non-CS major students interested in our courses. In this paper, we present the motivation, curriculum design, and evidence of effectiveness for this new course. We describe the specific design decisions we made in response to the experiences of non-CS majors in CS1. We also demonstrate that students' outcomes in CS0.5--measured in terms of students' pass rates, satisfaction, and attitudes--all not only improve compared to non-CS majors in CS1, but also largely match those of CS majors in CS1. Finally, we present student feedback, gathered through surveys and Appreciative Inquiry focus groups, that illustrates how our curriculum design choices better meet our non-major students' needs. The most-valued course design elements, as identified by focus group participants, provide insight for other CS educators who are designing similar courses.

Alumni make contributions to a Computer Science program in three interconnected ways, all of which relate to the interplay between the academic environment and the "real world." For students who aim to enter the job market upon graduation, alumni provide a friendly way to receive mentoring and advice and develop a professional network. When faculty are looking for real-world projects and experiences for students, alumni provide an avenue for entrance into industry. Finally, alumni can provide assessment data about the performance of students in the workplace after graduation.

Our study explores the use of tinkering strategies across genders in undergraduate students of Computer Science. We present a definition and a framework for tinkering as it applies to this context, and use these to investigate how students across genders tinker with hardware and software. Our goal is to examine gender-based differences in tinkering behaviour and to discuss the meaning and implications of these differences on teaching and learning in Computer Science. We gathered data via interviews and a questionnaire and used both qualitative and quantitative methods for analysis. Our work is preliminary and suggests further areas of research in this domain.

Most students see exams as a stressful experience, having crammed as much as they possibly can and hoping that the material they have studied would indeed be on the exams, and the material that they did not have the time to study for, nor understand, would be overlooked by their professors. At the same time, instructors see exams as formal assessments of student learning. Exams are seldom thought of as a learning experience. In this paper, we report our experiences in the use of two-stage exams as a learning experience for the students in two different courses. In a two-stage exam, students write an exam individually, then they rewrite the same exam in collaboration with three or four other students. One of the main objectives is to encourage peer instruction and promote learning even during the exams. Students obtain immediate feedback during the exam, and initial results have shown that this type of exam format produces some positive effects in later assessment.

We report on an exploratory study we conducted to investigate what kind of diagrammatic tool support, if any, is desired by programmers. The study involved 19 professional programmers working at three different companies. We found that the study participants desire a wide range of information content in diagrams, which would change depending upon the particular context of use. Meeting these needs may require flexible, adaptive and responsive diagramming tool support.

Talk is an application for a mobile device that allows people with aphasia to capture and manage digital photographs to support face-to-face communication. Unlike any other augmentative and alternative communication device for people with aphasia, PhotoTalk focuses solely on image capture and organization and is designed to be used independently. Our project used a streamlined process with 3 phases: (1) a rapid participatory design and development phase with two speech-language pathologists acting as representative users, (2) an informal usability study with 5 aphasic participants, which caught usability problems and provided preliminary feedback on the usefulness of PhotoTalk, and (3) a 1 month field evaluation with 2 aphasic participants, which showed that both used it regularly and fairly independently, although not always for its intended communicative purpose. Our field study demonstrated PhotoTalk's promise in terms of its usability and usefulness in real life situations.

Current methods of playlist creation and maintenance do not support user needs, especially in a mobile context. Furthermore, they do not scale: studies show that users with large mp3 collections have abandoned the concept of playlists. To remedy the usability problems associated with playlist creation and navigation - in particular, reliance on visual feedback and the absence of rapid content scanning mechanisms - we propose a system that utilizes the haptic channel. A necessary first step in this objective is the creation of a haptic mapping for music. In this paper, we describe an exploratory study addressed at understanding the feasibility, with respect to learnability and usability, of efficient, eyes-free playlist navigation based on symbolic haptic renderings of key song parameters. Users were able to learn haptic mappings for music parameters to usable accuracy with 4 minutes of training. These results indicate promise for the approach and support for continued effort in both improving the rendering scheme and implementing the haptic playlist system.