Background: Prior research about lecturing practices in computer science (CS) has not focused on the accessibility of those practices.

Background: Prior research on a culturally responsive summer computer science (CS) program for high school students found that demographic disparities remained in students' likelihood of pursuing CS.

We aim to bring together colleagues who share a common interest in Computer Science and Engineering Bridge programs, which are designed to bridge the gap for less experienced and/or underserved students as they begin their university studies. We invite those interested in starting bridge programs at their institutions, as well as those knowledgeable about existing bridge programs, their best practices, and lessons learned. Together, we will discuss the most effective approaches to these programs and challenges that arise in their implementations, including exclusivity in the selection of admits, target audience, funding limitations, outreach, and more. We aim to have participants leave with resources, including information about other programs, points of contact for networking, a collaborative document from the session, as well as a website for hosting resources of existing programs. Our goal is to foster conversation and create a network of support so these programs can sustain despite general discouragement.

Background: In higher education, efforts to broaden participation in computing (BPC) are typically evaluated at a single institution, which limits our ability to isolate their impacts from those of other factors at the institution.

College has a lot of unwritten rules, and some of our students will matriculate knowing those rules while others don't. Research has shown that revising homework assignments to make these unwritten rules explicit can help students' academic confidence and sense of belonging. This tutorial is intended for faculty who may be interested in revising their assignments to make those unwritten rules clear to students. We will focus on Transparent Assignment Design, a framework used to make explicit the purpose, task, and criteria of assignments. Come to this tutorial for a crash course on making your assignments transparent followed by hands-on help! Please bring an assignment you are interested in revising (or we will provide samples) and your choice of editing tool (e.g., laptop, pen/paper).

Background: Computer Science (CS) industry internships are valuable experiences for undergraduate CS students, and internship participation is predicted by extracurricular participation.

Analogies and metaphors are ubiquitous in computing education, helping instructors break down complex or abstract ideas by connecting them to familiar experiences. This Birds of a Feather session invites educators from across the CS curriculum—from introductory through advanced courses—to share ''sticky'' analogies: explanations that clarify challenging concepts and remain memorable for students. Facilitators will begin with a small set of example analogies that illustrate how to articulate a learning goal, map each component of the analogy to the target concept, and identify any needed cultural or background knowledge. The floor will then open for attendees to contribute analogies that have either worked well for them or fallen flat, enabling collective reflection on what makes an analogy effective or ineffective. A shared document will be collaboratively built during the session so attendees can take away new analogies, refine existing ones, and continue contributing after the symposium.

Summer bridge programs are initiatives aimed at supporting students as they transition into university, helping them build confidence, skills, and a sense of belonging. Many existing programs focus on serving less experienced and/or historically underrepresented students, striving to broaden participation in STEM fields. We aim to bring together colleagues who share a common interest in Computer Science and Engineering Bridge programs. We invite both those interested in starting bridge programs at their institutions and those with knowledge of existing programs, including best practices and lessons learned. We will collaborate to discuss the most effective approaches to these programs and challenges that arise in their implementations, including exclusivity in the selection of admits, target audience, funding limitations, outreach, and more. We aim to have participants leave with resources, including information about other programs, points of contact for networking, and a collaborative document from the discussion, as well as a website for hosting resources of existing programs.

Students from historically underrepresented communities in computer science (CS) report being told that their successes are due to special treatment based on their gender and/or racial identity. We refer to this microaggression as the discounting-success microaggression.We analyzed survey responses from 4,327 CS majors across 221 institutions in the U.S. We found that students who identify as women, Black, and/or Asian were more likely than men and white students, respectively, to report the discounting-success microaggression. This discounting-success microaggression significantly and negatively predicts students' self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and plans to persist in CS. Our results elucidate the negative influence of the discounting-success microaggression on CS student outcomes. Efforts are needed to improve the culture and interactions in CS to eliminate the prevalence of this harmful microaggression.

Background: Instructional transparency makes a course’s learning goals, evaluation criteria, and path to success clear to students, with the goal of improving equity in higher education. Increased transparency may improve equity by bolstering students’ self-efficacy and sense of belonging in computing, both of which are correlated with persistence in the field. Purpose: We aim to understand whether there are group differences in how students perceive and benefit from instructional transparency. We are additionally interested in understanding whether perceiving instructional transparency is positively correlated with students’ self-efficacy and sense of belonging and, therefore, can contribute to the persistence of students from historically underrepresented groups in computing. Methods: To investigate these relationships, we used linear regressions to analyze survey responses from 11,046 undergraduate students from 203 institutions. Findings: We found that there are group differences in students’ perception of transparency in their CS courses: students who identify as women, first-generation college students, and/or disabled reported perceiving less instructional transparency than their peers. We also found that perceiving more transparency has a positive correlation with students’ self-efficacy and sense of belonging in computing while controlling for important confounding variables, such as prior CS experience. We further demonstrated that this relationship is different for certain groups of students: first, for Black students and first-generation college students, perceiving transparency has a larger positive impact on their self-efficacy, and second, for Hispanic students, perceiving transparency has a smaller positive impact on their sense of belonging. Contributions: Our work constitutes one of the first empirical, multi-institutional investigations of the perceptions and benefits of transparency in CS classrooms that focuses on group differences. Our work also includes a theoretical articulation of the mechanisms through which transparent teaching practices may influence students’ self-efficacy and sense of belonging in computing. Taken together, our empirical findings and theoretical argument provide important evidence for the benefits of instructional transparency in CS courses, particularly as it relates to improving equity in computing.

Background: ChatGPT became widespread in early 2023 and enabled the broader public to use powerful generative AI, creating a new means for students to complete course assessments.

Broadening participation in computing (BPC) is a focus in industry and academia. Extant research focuses on what broadening participation in computing (BPC) efforts are pursued, while we propose focusing on how change happens. Our qualitative study applied John Kotter's (2012) eight-stage change framework to analyze interviews with faculty and staff engaged in BPC efforts. Illustrative examples from our interviews elucidate each of the eight stages and how they can be applied to pursue organizational change efforts that support BPC.

This workshop is intended for faculty, staff, and students engaged in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) work within their institution. It will build on participants' experiences in other collaborative or committee-based work and on participants' experiences with DEI. The goal of the workshop is for attendees to learn, both from the organizers and from one another, key practices for leading effective DEI activities and committees. To facilitate this discussion, the facilitators will provide a list of ten challenges faced by DEI committees: (1) recruiting and motivating contributors, (2) training contributors, (3) working with narrowly focused committee members, (4) responding to department members who resist DEI, (5) prioritizing DEI activities, (6) discovering problem situations, (7) responding to problem situations, (8) navigating power dynamics, (9) operating within legal and political constraints, and (10) running effective meetings. Participants will be invited to identify other challenges as well.

In this workshop, participants will learn to use physical Java memory models to help students develop a deep conceptual understanding of Java variables (see www.csteachingtips.org/3D). These physical models use the metaphor of a "remote control" to introduce references. Using table-top versions of the physical models, participants will discuss and be prepared to use physical objects to help students understand: (1) how primitive variables and references variables behave in similar and different ways, (2) how reference variables that both reference an object or array can both modify its content, (3) how calling a method with an argument creates a local variable within that method, and (4) inside an object method, the variable this references the object we called the method on. Participants will receive a set of these physical models to use in their classroom.

This microteaching session is like Nifty Assignments for instruction. Instead of having the presenters just talk about their teaching, they will simulate how they would actually teach something. Covering a range of topics and grade levels, six educators will demo how they would teach a specific topic. To help identify the pedagogical practices that cut across grade bands and topics, the moderator, Colleen Lewis, will describe how their pedagogical practices connect with education research. The goal of the session is to inspire SIGCSE attendees by highlighting innovative instruction by exceptional educators. Attendees can adopt the content and/or pedagogical practices from each microteaching example.

Computing self-efficacy is an important factor in shaping students' motivation, performance, and persistence in computer science (CS) courses. Therefore, investigating computing self-efficacy may help to improve the persistence of students from historically underrepresented groups in computing. Previous research has shown that computing self-efficacy is positively correlated with prior computing experience, but negatively correlated with some demographic identities (e.g., identifying as a woman). However, existing research has not demonstrated these patterns on a large scale while controlling for confounding variables and institutional context. In addition, there is a need to study the experiences of students with multiple marginalized identities through the lens of intersectionality. Our goal is to investigate the relationship between students' computing self-efficacy and their prior experience in computing, demographic identities, and institutional policies. We conduct this investigation using a large, recent, and multi-institutional dataset with survey responses from 31,425 students. Our findings confirm that more computing experience positively predicts computing self-efficacy. However, identifying as Asian, Black, Native, Hispanic, non-binary, and/or a woman were statistically significantly associated with lower computing self-efficacy. The results of our work point to several future avenues for self-efficacy research in computing.

Background : Affirmative action programs (AAPs) aim to increase the representation of people from historically underrepresented groups (HUGs) in the workforce, but can unintentionally signal that a person from a HUG was selected for their identity rather than their merit. We call this signal the diversity-hire narrative. Prior work has found that women hear the diversity-hire narrative during their computer science (CS) internships, but women and non-binary students' experiences surrounding the narrative are important to understand and have not been thoroughly explored.

This session will help attendees interested in broadening participation in computing (BPC) select specific BPC activities to engage in, either individually or as a group or department. Attendees will be provided with a list of more than 60 BPC activities and will participate in a guided discussion to help select those best suited to them. Topics of discussion will be introduced by the session organizers, discussed in small groups, and then summary points will be shared with all attendees. The guided topic prompts will cover (1) how each activity contributes to BPC; (2) the expected feasibility, impact, and relevance of activities and how to prioritize them; (3) methods of sustaining activities for long enough to see results; and (4) next steps, including implementing activities and incorporating them into departmental BPC plans. At the end of the session, each attendee will have selected multiple BPC activities suited to their goals and institution and have developed their ability to analyze BPC activities along several axes and anticipate how best to sustain them.

Training the growing number of Computer Science Education (CSEd) PhD students is a pressing concern for our community. To meet the needs of our CSEd PhD students at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, we have developed a new course designed to strengthen students’ foundation in relevant fields. Through a collaborative process, we developed a reading list that covers the educational theory and perspectives that most inform our own work, as well as concepts that prepare our graduates to engage with the broader CSEd community.

No abstract available.

Background: Code comprehension research has identified gaps between the strategies experts and novices use in comprehending code. In computer science (CS) education, code comprehension has recently received increased attention, and research has identified correlations between code comprehension and code writing. While there is a long history of identifying expert code-comprehension strategies, there has been less work to understand and support the incremental development of code comprehension expertise.

Background: The goal of affirmative action programs (AAPs) is to address the underrepresentation of people from historically underrepresented groups (HUGs) in the workforce. People who identify as women, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx/a/o/*, Native American, Native Alaskan, Native Hawai’ian, and/or Pacific Islander are considered to be a part of HUGs in computing. AAPs can unintentionally signal that a person from a HUG was selected for a position based on their gender or race/ethnicity rather than their merit [2, 3, 5, 6]. We call this signal the diversity-hire narrative. In computing, prior work has found that women hear the diversity-hire narrative during their computer science (CS) internships [4], but women’s experiences surrounding the narrative have not been thoroughly explored.

A hands-on session for creating department-level plans to coordinate Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) work. Departmental BPC Plans can help provide continuity and greater impact in BPC work and provide opportunities for more faculty to engage. The workshop is organized around a series of guided hands-on activities selecting and refining specific goals and activities with the final result being an outline of a full BPC plan. We also include some discussion of next steps and invite participants to join our active Slack workspace. Individuals interested in this workshop may also be interested in the follow-on workshop, Departmental BPC Plans 2 - Finalizing your Plan.

A hands-on session for finalizing a Departmental BPC Plans for verification on BPCnet.org. Verification of a Departmental BPC Plan enables faculty from an institution to use it as part of a grant submission to the National Science Foundation (NSF). This workshop is intended for people from the United States who have an existing Departmental BPC Plan or who will have created one in the workshop "Departmental BPC Plans 1." The workshop is organized around a series of guided hands-on activities to help participants complete a draft of a Departmental BPC Plan that can be Verified by BPCnet.org.

Students' goals may be one of many factors contributing to the underrepresentation of women, people who identify as Black, Hispanic, Latinx/a/o/*, or Native, and first-generation college students in computing. This study examines whether students who desire a career that enables them to pursue communal goals: goals of working with or for the benefit of others (e.g., have a social impact, serve humanity, help others, or give back to their community) may be deterred from computing if they perceive it as incompatible with those goals. Using survey data from over 45,000 undergraduate students, results show that women, compared to men of their same racial/ethnic identity, endorse social impact goals at higher rates, and that the relationship between a student's sense of belonging in computing and their goals is moderated by their perception of the communal goal affordances of computing.

SIGCSE is packed with teaching insights and inspiration. However, we get these insights and inspiration from hearing our colleagues talk about their teaching. Why not watch them teach? This session does exactly that! Six exceptional educators will present innovative content just as they would to their students. The moderator, Colleen Lewis, will describe their pedagogical moves and how they connect to education research. The goal of the session is to inspire SIGCSE attendees by highlighting innovative instruction by exceptional educators. Attendees can adopt the content and/or pedagogical moves from each microteaching example.

In this workshop, participants will learn to use physical Java memory models to help students develop a deep conceptual understanding of Java variables. These physical models use the metaphor of a "remote control" to introduce references. Using table-top versions of the physical models, participants will discuss and be prepared to use physical objects to help students understand: (1) how primitive variables and references variables behave in similar and different ways, (2) how reference variables that both reference an object or array can both modify its content, (3) how calling a method with an argument creates a local variable within that method, and (4) inside an object method, the variable this references the object we called the method on. Participants will receive a set of these physical models to use in their classroom.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity are in-demand skills, but little is known about what factors influence computer science (CS) undergraduate students' decisions on whether to specialize in AI or cybersecurity and how these factors may differ between populations. In this study, we interviewed undergraduate CS majors about their perceptions of AI and cybersecurity. Qualitative analyses of these interviews show that students have narrow beliefs about what kind of work AI and cybersecurity entail, the kinds of people who work in these fields, and the potential societal impact AI and cybersecurity may have. Specifically, students tended to believe that all work in AI requires math and training models, while cybersecurity consists of low-level programming; that innately smart people work in both fields; that working in AI comes with ethical concerns; and that cybersecurity skills are important in contemporary society. Some of these perceptions reinforce existing stereotypes about computing and may disproportionately affect the participation of students from groups historically underrepresented in computing. Our key contribution is identifying beliefs that students expressed about AI and cybersecurity that may affect their interest in pursuing the two fields and may, therefore, inform efforts to expand students' views of AI and cybersecurity. Expanding student perceptions of AI and cybersecurity may help correct misconceptions and challenge narrow definitions, which in turn can encourage participation in these fields from all students.

Enrollments in computer science courses and majors are at or exceeding capacity at the college level. This context drives local innovations that may benefit individuals across the SIGCSE community. The panelists will share how, in the context of booming enrollments and COVID, they strive to protect faculty time, engage students in larger classes, take advantage of scale, improve student-TA interactions, motivate faculty to teach larger classes, and better monitor students in large classes. During the panel Q&A, attendees will be invited to share additional strategies live on Course.Care, which will then be disseminated through CSTeachingTips.org.

Broadening participation in computing (BPC) requires our individual and collective effort. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is leading an effort in the USA to encourage NSF grant awardees and all computing departments to create BPC plans. Panelists will share resources and advice for how attendees can get involved. Students, staff, and faculty can all play an important role in broadening participation in computing. Because the NSF effort and supporting resources on BPCnet.org are relatively new, the panel will introduce these efforts and share how attendees can help by sharing information within their institution and broader network. The NSF-funded project BPCnet.org has resources for developing and enacting BPC plans.

In this special session, we present tools and resources created from educational theory to make teaching and scholarship easier and more effective. Included in these resources are CS Teachers Association, CSforAll, CS Teaching Tips, CT Pathways Toolkit, EngageCSEdu, CS Assessments Hub, Cybersecurity, and CS Ed Research Resource Center. These tools/resources provide assistance at the district and school level (administrators, curriculum designers), classroom level (teachers), and researcher/evaluator level. In addition to these overviews, we will provide information on where to find them and will leave ample time for questions from attendees.

Have you ever frozen-not knowing what to say-when you heard a biased comment from a student or colleague? It is challenging to interrupt microaggressions and respond to biased beliefs in the moment, but practice helps people become more comfortable and confident. In this special session, teams from the CSTA Equity Fellowship and CSTeachingTips.org will demonstrate an activity that invites participants to discuss how they would respond to different tricky situations related to bias. Participants will directly engage in the activity and learn how they can use it in ongoing professional development for K-12 computer science teachers.

This panel explores experiences and insights from three successful propagators into how others can successfully encourage more wide-spread use of their innovations. Issues covered include designing for dissemination, techniques for recruiting potential adopters, suggestions for convincing faculty to try an innovation and continue using it, and identifying points of friction and overcoming resistance from administrators, students, and/or peers. These topics are discussed and illustrated with personal experiences and anecdotes from our illustrious panelists.

In the US, there are longstanding patterns of underrepresentation in computing (see Table 1). To make CS more inclusive, we can train computer science (CS) teaching assistants (TAs) to create inclusive classrooms. The Teaching Practices Game is a scenario-based card game meant to prepare CS TAs for difficult situations they may encounter and help them promote diversity and inclusion. Game participants (N=86) were surveyed from multiple institutions. The majority of survey respondents (N=86) agreed or strongly agreed that the game taught them new strategies for responding to difficult teaching situations (83%) and for discussing diversity and inclusion (69%). Additionally, respondents reported that the game made them more confident (74%) and more likely (66%) to respond to biased statements. Contrary to our hypotheses, we found that there were small and statistically insignificant differences in enjoyment, learning, or likelihood of response to biased statements between participants who do and do not identify as underrepresented in CS. A primary contribution of the research is a review of professional development practices and diversity training strategies that can inform the training of TAs, and we discuss the extent to which best practices from previous research were incorporated in the game.

I have created a notional machine that uses physical objects to help students understand references and objects in Java programs. These physical models may help students understand the abstract representation of Java programs - much like blocks or other physical items help young children reason about abstract things like quantity, addition, and subtraction. This article and accompanying videos may be of interest to Java teachers and to researchers interested in evaluating or comparing the effectiveness of notional machines.

This panel provides examples of how faculty refine, expand, and evaluate initiatives to broaden participation in computing using the Data Buddies Survey (https://cra.org/cerp/data-buddies). The Computing Research Association administers the survey annually and prepares summary reports for over 140 member institutions. Participation is free, and the survey gathers information about students' educational experiences, confidence, attitudes, and career goals. Faculty and staff from prospective and participating institutions can benefit from the panelists' discussion of aligning department initiatives for broadening participation with data about students' experiences.

SIGCSE is packed with teaching insights and inspiration. However, we get these insights and inspiration from hearing our colleagues talk about their teaching. Why not just watch them teach? This session does exactly that. Six exceptional educators will present their favorite piece of innovative lecture content just as they would to their students. The moderator, Colleen Lewis, will describe the central pedagogical move within the innovation and how this connects to education research. The goal of the session is to inspire SIGCSE attendees by highlighting innovative instruction by exceptional educators. The specific content of the innovative instruction may be applicable for some attendees, and the discussion of the underlying pedagogical move within each innovation can be applied across the attendees' teaching.

Broadening participation in computing touches every aspect of the undergraduate experience. This special session highlights the initiatives undertaken by NCWIT Academic Alliance members who are working to broaden participation in computing. A mix of 3-minute lightning talks, review of resources, and Q&A will provide attendees opportunities to create connections and grapple with implementation issues at their institution. This special session is a reprise of a well-reviewed session from the NCWIT Summit, and will introduce strategies for admission to major, curriculum, pedagogy, teaching assistant selection, and undergraduate research.

The goal of the session is to help attendees who are committed to diversity and inclusion learn to talk about different dimensions of identity (e.g., race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, etc.). The landscape of terms is always changing and we want SIGCSE attendees to feel more comfortable using current language to talk about issues related to diversity and inclusion. This special session will include eight short videos, individual reflection, and a Q&A with presenters. This is an expansion of a special session held at the NCWIT Summit in 2019; it was well received and we hope to offer it to the larger SIGCSE audience. The format also lends itself to attendees sharing the videos and discussions with their colleagues after SIGCSE, which are available at http://ncwit.org/intersectionality-videos

A notional machine is a pedagogic device to assist the understanding of some aspect of programs or programming. It is typically used to support explaining a programming construct, or the user-understandable semantics of a program. For example, a variable is like a box with a label, and assignment copies or moves a value into that box. This working group will capture examples of notional machines from actual pedagogical practice, as expressed in textbooks (or other teaching materials) or used in the classroom. We will interview at least 30 teachers about their experience with, and perceptions of, the use of notional machines in teaching. Using the interviews, we will work on devising and refining a form to characterise essential features of notional machines. We will also attempt to relate them to each other to describe potential learning sequences or progressions. The working group report will contain descriptions of notional machines used at different levels in education, in different countries, by many teachers. Capturing and Characterising Notional Machines Sally Fincher, Johan Jeuring, Craig S Miller Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). ITiCSE 2020,,Trondheim, Norway © 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). 978-1-4503-0000-0/18/06...$15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/1234567890 The resulting catalogue of notional machines will allow a teacher to select a machine for a particular use, permit comparison between them, and provide a starting point for further categorization and analysis of notional machines. Additionally, we will make more theoretical explorations. We will explore a variety of presentational formats, examining what is necessary and what superfluous; we will look for dimensions of comparison and will examine how notional machines are instantiated across the discipline. We argue that the creation and use of notional machines is potentially a signature pedagogy for computing [1] and that creating and using notional machines represents a certain level of pedagogic sophistication that might be an indicator of pedagogic content knowledge (PCK).

Many SIGCSE attendees bring what they learn at SIGCSE back to their colleagues. In our well attended Special Sessions at SIGCSE in 2018 and 2019, attendees learned to respond to bias, which might be more difficult to bring back to their colleagues. This workshop will prepare attendees to lead interactive-sessions about responding to bias at their institution or at other conferences. The workshop will begin by modeling an interactive-session with updated materials from SIGCSE 2019. The workshop attendees will then explore facilitation strategies, ways of managing difficult conversations, and all attendee concerns. All attendees will receive printed copies of the game (csteachingtips.org/cards) to use at their institution or to local conferences.

The 32 chapters of the 2019 Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research synthesize the existing research in computing education and propose new directions for future research. An author from each chapter will summarize their chapter with auto-advancing slides. Attendees will be introduced to the breadth of content in the new handbook and can identify chapters of interest. This fits uniquely as a special session, and will likely be informative, inspiring, and overwhelming.

In this interactive special session, participants will learn to facilitate a workshop for training teaching assistants (TAs) based on a card game. The game invites players to respond to challenging scenarios that TAs may face in the course of their duties. Each scenario appears on a card, and players discuss how they would respond. Session participants will receive a deck of 52 of these cards created with funding from a SIGCSE Special Projects Grant. This session uses the format of two previous well attended SIGCSE special sessions that focused on bias and had a target audience of faculty. While the intended audience is those interested in TA training, everyone interested in inclusive teaching practices is welcome to join in the rich small and large group discussions that we expect to take place!

Diversity and inclusion are popular topics at SIGCSE. However, few researchers examine questions specifically focused on race. Such research is of great interest to the SIGCSE community, but is typically conducted by education faculty and published in education journals. This panel attempts to introduce attendees to relevant background and methods, such that attendees can more easily understand and contribute to computer science education research related to race. This panel attempts to bridge our two communities by inviting race scholars from education to share their expertise with computer science education researchers and practitioners.

There has been an expansion of computer science (CS) in high schools in the USA. In most cases, initiatives seeking to expand high school CS offerings are not focused simply on increasing the number of students enrolled, but are focused on broadening participation in computing (BPC). Ideally we can evaluate and replicate effective BPC, or CSforAll, initiatives at the high school level. However, analyses of CS expansion frequently focus on the national landscape, despite the decentralized nature of public education in the USA. State-level analyses, when present, often do not take into account the demographics of high school students in the state, which are also changing over time. We propose three metrics for evaluating the impact of state-level initiatives to broaden participation in computing at the high school level. These metrics and our data set can be helpful benchmarks for evaluating high school CSforAll initiatives.

Enrollment in computing at the college level has skyrocketed, and many institutions have responded by enacting competitive enrollment processes. However, little is known about the effects of enrollment policies on students' experiences. To identify relationships between those policies and students' experiences, we linked survey data from 1245 first-year students in 80 CS departments to a dataset of department policies. We found that competitive enrollment negatively predicts first-year students' perception of the computing department as welcoming, their sense of belonging, and their self-efficacy in computing. Both belonging and self-efficacy are known predictors of student retention in CS. In addition, these relationships are stronger for students without pre-college computing experience. Our classification of institutions as competitive is conservative, and false positives are likely. This biases our results and suggests that the negative relationships we found are an underestimation of the effects of competitive enrollment.

The lack of diversity has been a troubling issue for the field of computing. As the industry continues to expand, it is imperative that diversity levels in computing fields increase to fill the ever-growing number of computing jobs and to represent the technological needs of a diverse populace. Our research seeks to better understand the factors that lead to this lack of diversity by analyzing data from computing majors from colleges within the United States and Canada. Our study reveals that students of different demographic backgrounds have varying levels of communal values, which, depending on how they perceive the affordance of computing to fulfill such values, predict their sense of belonging in computing, which is an important predictor of student retention.

The goal of the session is to help attendees who are committed to diversity and inclusion learn to talk about different dimensions of identity (e.g., race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, etc.). The landscape of terms is always changing and we want SIGCSE attendees to feel more comfortable using current language to talk about issues related to diversity and inclusion. This special session will include six lightning talks, individual reflection, small-group discussion, and a Q&A with presenters. This is a reprise of a special session held at the NCWIT Summit in 2018; it was well received and we hope to offer it to the larger SIGCSE audience.

The CISE directorate of the NSF is rolling out a requirement that all NSF grants include a Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) plan (www.nsf.gov/cise/bpc/). This has the potential to drive important institutional change across CS departments in the U.S. This panel of BPC experts will offer their perspectives on meaningful BPC activities, talk about existing BPC programs, and share BPC-related resources that can help PIs and departments craft high-quality BPC plans. The panelists will offer contrasting perspectives on topics such as K-12 outreach, the allocation of department funds for BPC, faculty engagement, and first steps departments should take. Ultimately, NSF review panels made up of CISE community members will evaluate BPC plans, but we hope to spark productive conversations in the interest of fostering institutional change to achieve the social imperative of BPC.

As we celebrate the 50th SIGCSE Symposium, this panel explores how computing education researchers chart a course individually and as a community to build our research practices and collective knowledge of computing education. This navigation involves developing our research goals, which tools we use to work towards those goals, and which academic communities outside of computing education we seek to learn from and contribute to. However, these processes of navigation are rarely discussed as a community. Paper and grant submissions and reviews provide an imperfect way for our community to communicate our varied values and priorities. This panel brings together experts in computing education research who differ in their research goals, tools, and external communities. We can expect a lively discussion amongst the panelist and we hope to spark important discussions within the computing education research community!

Computational thinking has become the calling card for re-introducing coding into schools. While much attention has focused on how students engage in designing systems, applications, and other computational artifacts as a measure of success for computational thinking, far fewer efforts have focused on what goes into remediating problems in designing systems and interactions because learners invariably make mistakes that need fixing-or debugging. In this panel, we examine the often overlooked practice of debugging that presents significant learning challenges (and opportunities) to students in completing assignments and instructional challenges to teachers in helping students to succeed in their classrooms. The panel participants will review what we know and don't know about debugging, discuss ways to conceptualize and study debugging, and present instructional approaches for helping teachers and students to engage productively in debugging situations.

Many SIGCSE attendees are committed to inclusive teaching practices and creating an inclusive culture within their classrooms; yet, advocating for and sustaining these initiatives may require having difficult conversations with our colleagues and students. Understandably, many faculty are unsure about how to talk about sensitive topics such as race and gender with their colleagues and students. Research suggests that practicing some of these difficult conversations is essential to achieve the goals of inclusive teaching and culture. In our well attended session at SIGCSE in 2018, attendees learned strategies for responding to bias in academic settings. This was facilitated by playing two rounds of a research-based game developed by the NSF project CSTeachingTips.org (#1339404). This session will extend the work begun last year by helping attendees to replicate this activity with their colleagues. In this special session, attendees will first play the game to practice those strategies in small groups and will then receive facilitation tips and guidance for conducting this activity on their own. All attendees will receive a printed copy of the game and a link to download and print more copies.

SIGCSE is packed with teaching insights and inspiration. However, we get these insights and inspiration from hearing our colleagues talk about their teaching. Why not just watch them teach? This session does exactly that. Six exceptional educators will present their favorite piece of innovative lecture content just as they would their students. The moderator, Colleen Lewis, will describe the central pedagogical move within the innovation and how this connects to education research. The goal of the session is to inspire SIGCSE attendees by highlighting innovative instruction by exceptional educators. The specific content of the innovative instruction may be applicable for some attendees, and the discussion of the underlying pedagogical move within each innovation can be applied across the attendees' teaching.

Undergraduates have been an important part of the teaching staff at many universities for decades, but this is not a universal practice. This BOF provides a forum to discuss undergraduate TA/mentor programs at various stages in their evolution. Attendees will have an opportunity to discuss the benefits, best practices, and research questions related to the use of undergraduates as teaching assistants and/or mentors. The audience is expected to consist of faculty that have already implemented such programs, and those who might be considering doing so, and want to share information about successes and challenges. Discussion Leader(s): Phill Conrad will facilitate the discussion and invite Colleen Lewis, Cynthia Lee and Diba Mirza to briefly speak about the Undergraduate TA/Mentor programs at their respective institutions. During the balance of the time participants will be invited to contribute ideas or ask questions related to the use of undergraduate TAs and mentors. Expertise of Discussion Leader(s): Diba Mirza and Phill Conrad are faculty in the Computer Science department at UC Santa Barbara, where they have created an undergraduate mentor program in the past two years. Colleen Lewis is an Associate Professor of CS at Harvey Mudd College, and is the lead PI for the csteachingtips.org project, a project to collect and document CS pedagogical content knowledge. Cynthia Lee is a Lecturer in CS at Stanford University, and works closely with the longstanding undergraduate TA program in the department.

A meritocracy is an environment in which rewards are based solely on ability. The concept of privilege runs counter to this idea. Privilege is an unearned, unasked for advantage gained because of the way society views an aspect of your identity such as race, ethnicity, gender, perceived socioeconomic status, and language. Privilege can affect our students experiences in the classroom and beyond. However, privilege does not have to be viewed as an entitlement, but rather an opportunity to level the playing field for all people. In this session, we seek to visually display the world of privilege through adapting interactive activities known as a privilege walk and an asset walk. Come to learn and meet with other attendees who want to create a more inclusive society

SIGCSE is packed with teaching insights and inspiration. However, we get these insights and inspiration from hearing our colleagues talk about their teaching. Why not just watch them teach? This session does exactly that. Each of six exceptional educators will be given ten minutes to teach the audience something. After this, the moderator will draw the attention of the audience to particular pedagogical moves that the instruction included. Attendees can see a new approach to introducing a topic or a new pedagogical move. No matter what, we expect attendees will be taking ideas from this session directly back to their teaching! The format is based upon a practice in chemistry of sharing "Five Slides About," which introduce a topic in a novel or concise way (https://www.ionicviper.org/types/five_slides_about). Resources from each of the presenters will be shared on the website CSTeachingTips.org.

Many SIGCSE attendees are committed to inclusive teaching practices and creating an inclusive culture within their classrooms; yet, advocating for and sustaining these initiatives may require having difficult conversations with our colleagues and students. Understandably, many faculty are unsure about how to talk about sensitive topics such as race and gender with their colleagues and students. Research suggests that practicing some of these difficult conversations is essential to achieve the goals of inclusive teaching and culture. Most SIGCSE attendees probably use active learning throughout their teaching, but we rarely see active learning at SIGCSE - let's try it! In this interactive session, attendees will learn strategies for responding to bias in academic settings. Attendees will then practice those strategies in small groups. This will be facilitated by playing two rounds of a research-based game learning approach developed by the NSF project CSTeachingTips.org (#1339404), which has been tested in group of 200 teaching assistants. This is the fifth iteration of the game-learning approach and all attendees will receive a printed copy of the game and a link to download and print more copies.

Meaningful and engaging assignments are important to retention in CS. An interesting problem context may be able to make routine practice of programming basics more interesting for students. Problem contexts also provide the opportunity to bring in content related to social justice topics, which are important for providing students a well-rounded education. With funding from the NSF (#1339404), we have developed eight homework assignments that integrate social justice topics as the problem context for CS1 assignments. Workshop attendees will work in small groups to revise or adapt existing assignments, translate existing assignments into the language of their course, or develop a new assignment. Attendees will be encouraged to submit their work to Nifty Assignments for 2019 and NCWIT's peer-reviewed curriculum repository, Engage CS Edu (engage-csedu.org). All assignments will be posted on CSTeachingTips.org to be shared with the community.

Large volumes of Computer Science Educational (CS Ed) material are published every year but it is apparent that equally large volumes of this are not being read or having much impact on practice, or even available to the practitioners who could use it. How can we distribute CS Ed materials and information more effectively and in potentially innovative ways? This BOF will provide a platform for discussion on a selection of techniques that encourage discussion and dissemination of CS Ed techniques in the community. Is traditional publishing still a good approach or is it just part of a wider group of techniques?

Many organizations have developed websites to support high school computer science (CS) teachers by providing them with collections of teaching resources. Yet rarely do these sites take into account the unique challenges of new CS teachers who often have not had formal training in CS. In response to a documented lack of teachers' engagement on these sites, we interviewed 17 CS teachers to learn more about the ways in which these sites are and are not meeting teachers' needs for curriculum resources. We discuss our findings about how teachers use, adapt, and share resources and then provide several suggestions for designing resource sharing sites that support teachers who have varying levels of experience teaching CS.

Stereotypes of computer scientists are relevant to students' performance and feelings of belonging. While efforts exist to change these stereotypes, we argue that it may be possible to challenge a student's belief that stereotypes of computer scientists are relevant to whether they can become a computer scientist. In our previous work, we presented a model of five factors that influence students' decisions to major in computer science (CS). Data were collected from interviews with 31 students enrolled in introductory CS courses at two public universities in the United States. Here we elaborate on our grounded theory of one of these factors: how students assess their fit with CS. We describe how students measure their fit with CS in terms of the amount they see themselves as expressing the traits of singular focus, asocialness, competition, and maleness and how students make interpretations and decisions based upon these measurements. We found that students' interpretations were influenced by their attitudes toward the nature of stereotypes.

The pace of technology for use in computing education is staggering. In the last few years, the following technologies have completely transformed our teaching: Piazza, GradeScope, Google Docs, YouTube, Doodle and whenisgood.net, Skype and Google Hangout, and Khan Academy among others. Hardware has also played a part -- we love our Zoom digital voice recorder (for recording CD-quality lecture audio), Blue Yeti USB mike (for audio/videoconferences), and iClickers (for engaging students in class).

There are always some students who succeed and some students who don't. Our four panelists are committed to the success of all students, but have different explanations for students' lack of success. This panel discussion will highlight both their shared beliefs and disagreements between veteran CS educators Stuart Reges and Dan Garcia, CS education researcher Colleen Lewis, and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science Nathan Ensmenger. We hope this lively discussion will bring together divergent and complementary positions and expertise, as well as invite significant audience participation.

Institutions small and large often use student teaching assistants (TAs) to provide office hours, tutor students, and grade student work, and the quality of a course's TAs can greatly affect the quality of the course. In this BOF we will discuss the training we provide to prepare TAs for their course duties and the mentoring we provide to foster their role as future educators. Improving the effectiveness of TA training and mentoring can have an immediate impact on the quality of teaching, potentially improve retention and diversity in computer science, and have a long-term impact on all aspects of our field as our current students and TAs progress through their industry and academic careers. Our goal is to provide a forum for you to disseminate your TA mentoring practices and for you to hear the mentoring practices of others, with the goal to develop a collection of best practices for TA training and mentoring for computer science. This BOF is appropriate for professors or instructors of any computer science course or summer program that uses undergraduate or graduate student teaching assistants.

Dozens of online communities have been developed to support high school computer science (CS) teachers by providing them with CS teaching resources. However, these sites have failed to meet teachers' needs and are widely underused. Despite this underutilization, organizations continue to create new communities with content that overlaps with the materials provided within existing communities. Our research explores the barriers to CS teachers' engagement with online resources and their attitudes toward online communities. We find that teachers are frustrated by the time and difficulty required to navigate the sites and find useful information. It appears the barriers to accessing these resources cannot be overcome by creating additional large, multipurpose communities. Even though it seems that having large communities would be valuable for increasing access to resources, our research indicates teachers prefer smaller, more specialized communities. We are eager to discuss ideas for designing new communities that provide more relevant content for teachers in a way that is easy for them to find.

Let's talk about how we teach upper-division courses! CS pedagogical content knowledge - i.e., knowledge of how to teach computer science - is mostly undocumented. This is particularly true for upper-division courses and in some cases this upper-division content is much more difficult to teach than CS1 or CS2 content! CSTeachingTips.org is an NSF-sponsored project to help curate tips that allow teachers to anticipate students' difficulties and build upon students' strengths. The lightning talk will be a call to action: first to share tips on Twitter @CSTeachingTips and at our CSTeachingTips booth and second to create research directions that will help us develop pedagogical content knowledge that extends beyond CS1.

"Why doesn't my code work?" Instructors and TAs hear this question day in and day out during introductory computer science courses, and beyond. Students arguably have a harder time learning how to debug their own (and others') code than they do in learning how to plan and write the code in the first place. Debugging strategies are difficult to teach, and there are pros and cons to different debugging methods (e.g., print statements vs. gdb vs. Googling). This BoF will elicit strategies for teaching debugging to CS students, and we will discuss the benefits of introducing certain tools earlier or later in the curriculum. We will also discuss how to assess whether students are able to debug code effectively. All suggestions will be posted on CSTeachingTips.org for dissemination (See tinyurl.com/CSTT-TAs for tips from SIGCSE 2015). We welcome attendance from seasoned and novice instructors, and from teaching assistants.

Research suggests that pair programming increases student performance and decreases student attrition. However, less is known about the ways in which pair programming can unintentionally lead to inequitable relationships between students. Audio data were collected from pair programming interactions in a sixth-grade computer science enrichment program designed to promote equity. However, even in this context, there were surprising instances of inequity. We measured inequity by documenting the distribution of students' questions, commands, and total talk within four pairs. Analysis revealed that less equitable pairs sought to complete tasks quickly and this may have led to patterns of marginalization and domination. Notably, this focus on speed was not evident in the more equitable pairs. These findings are important for understanding mechanisms of inequity and designing equitable collaboration practices in computer science.

Instructors struggling to support their ever-growing undergraduate population may be interested in starting, expanding, or improving an undergraduate teaching assistant (TA) program. This session seeks to connect individuals interested brainstorming and sharing strategies for improving the impact of undergraduate TAs. We will break into small groups to discuss tips for (0) structuring funded and unfunded undergraduate TA programs, (1) training undergraduate TAs, and (2) recruiting and selecting undergraduate TAs. All tips will be posted on CSTeachingTips.org for dissemination to other CS educators. This BoF welcomes instructors already supporting undergraduate TAs and instructors who are interested in build an undergraduate TA program.

There has been a wealth of education research focused on recursion. This research has documented students' persistent difficulties with recursion, a variety of pedagogical approaches, and students' correct and incorrect mental models of recursion. This paper explores the variation in students' successful attempts to trace linear recursion. The findings go beyond correct and incorrect mental models to show how each of four modes of tracing linear recursion may require or facilitate a particular understanding of recursion. Additionally, the current study shows how knowledge of algebraic substitution can be applied to tracing linear recursion, and identifies a potential difficulty in students transferring this knowledge.

To better understand the learning and assessment of introductory computer science, we performed five complementary analyses on over 28 thousand student responses from the 2004 and 2009 Advanced Placement Computer Science (AP CS) A exams. Analyzing the questions from the 1988 AP CS exam, Reges hypothesized that a small set of questions, which were highly correlated with success on the rest of the exam, might be used to assess students' CS ability before taking a CS class. The pattern Reges observed was not replicated on the 2004 and 2009 AP CS A exams. Our hypotheses for why the pattern was not replicated advances Reges' alternative hypothesis regarding the importance of students' mental model of program execution.

This paper offers a framework for equitable instruction that emerged while designing a computer science course for students entering the sixth grade. Leveraging research from a range of fields, including sociology, mathematics education, and the learning sciences, we argue that in addition to material resources, such as rich course content and quality instruction, equity also depends on students' access to non-material resources, such as productive domain identities and peer relationships. We illustrate each dimension of the framework by describing in detail a core set of pedagogical practices implemented during a summer course.

To develop a model of students' debugging processes, I conducted a qualitative analysis of young students engaged in debugging computer programs they had written in the programming language Scratch. I present a microgenetic analysis that tracks how one student's attention to elements of computer program state shifted during his debugging process. I present evidence that this student had relevant domain knowledge and claim that his changing attention within the problem, and not his domain knowledge, mediated his debugging process. I hypothesize that a key competence in debugging is learning to identify what elements of program state are important to pay attention to and that this attention, and not only domain knowledge, mediates the debugging process. This hypothesis is consistent with a model of physics reasoning and learning from the Knowledge in Pieces theoretical framework and in this research I build upon education research outside of computer science. The case study analyzes the debugging process of a student entering the sixth grade, but I document an isomorphic case from a pair of college students to show that this pattern extends beyond this age.

The lower-division CS curriculum at the University of California, Berkeley includes a version of CS 2 that is intended to introduce students to Java as well as data structures and programming methodology. Some students in the course already have Java experience. In one course offering, students without previous Java experience received final grades that were 0.27 standard deviations below their peers who already had some Java experience (d=0.27, p<0.05). In a subsequent offering, the instructor adopted course policies and teaching strategies that made student collaboration more frequent in hopes that students without Java experience could learn from their peers with Java experience. In this highly-collaborative offering, there were no statistically significant differences in average final grades between students with and without Java experience (d=0.12, p<0.1). A smaller percentage of students dropped the highly-collaborative offering than the less-collaborative offering. This decrease in attrition was most notable for female students, from 37 percent to 5 percent.

In 2006, computing education was suffering from a crisis - enrollments were dropping sharply at universities and colleges across the United States, and interest in computing from high school and middle school students was waning significantly. At the 2007 SIGCSE Symposium, the ACM Education Board organized a special session to explore the underlying causes. In his keynote at the same conference, Grady Booch exhorted us to share the "passion, beauty, joy and awe" (PBJA) of computing. This led to a series of room-packed sessions at the following four SIGCSE symposia to explore that idea from different angles. They have provided a forum for sharing: "What we've done: Highlighting successful PBJA initiatives the presenters have undertaken or seen and wish to celebrate. "What we should do (curriculum): Pointing out where our curriculum is lacking in PBJA, and how to fix it. "How we should do it (pedagogy): Sharing how a change in attitude / focus / etc. can make strides to improving PBJA.

We found that fifth grade students' scores on Scratch programming quizzes in a summer enrichment course were highly correlated with their scores on a standardized test for mathematics. We identify ways in which the programming curriculum builds upon target skills from the Mathematics Content Standards for California Public Schools. We hypothesize that the programming curriculum leveraged and enriched students' mathematics content knowledge.

A dissertation overview addressing what resources students bring to learning to program, which may provide explanations for why some students are more or less successful learning to program.

There is great interest in understanding and influencing students' attraction to computing-related majors. This qualitative study is based on interviews with 31 students enrolled in introductory programming courses at two public universities in the United States. This paper presents a model of five factors that influence student decisions to major in CS and elaborates on our grounded theory analysis of one of these factors: how students assess their CS-related ability. We describe how students measure their ability in terms of speed, grades, and previous experience and how students make interpretations and decisions based upon these measurements. We found that students' interpretations were influenced by experiences in their environments and beliefs about ability as being fixed or malleable.

The Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology is a decade-old endeavor to expose pre-college young women and underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities to the fields of computer science and engineering, and prepare them for rigorous, university-level study. We have served more than 150 students, and graduated more than 65 seniors who have gone on to attend some of the top institutions in the country. Some of the lessons we have learned include the importance of sustained funding to support a continuing year-round program, world-class leaders and resources, and family and alumni involvement. In this article, we share the inner workings of our program, from its foundation during the dot-com heyday through today, in hopes that our best practices can be useful to others working toward the goal of broadening participation.

Computational Thinking (CT) has been articulated as a "fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists" [10]. Almost all agree with the lofty goals of the initiative, to teach humanity the ability to see the world through the sharpened eyes of a computer scientist. Others have shared their vision of what CT is, how to pave the way [7], weave it into a curriculum [1, 2, 9], and what the effects might be [8]. However, what does it really mean to be a computational thinker? While it is helpful to see examples that show we're already engaged in CT (e.g., using a backpack is pre-fetching and caching), it is perhaps more valuable to see everyday situations that are transformed when viewed through a computational thinker's trained eyes (e.g., writing dates as YYYY-MM-DD so they'll sort correctly). We hope to present enough examples to satisfy a growing chorus of those who need more grounding, using a unique delivery format.

This study compares the attitudinal and learning outcomes of sixth grade students programming in either Logo or Scratch. Given proposed affordances of the visual programming language, Scratch, I hypothesized that those students learning Scratch would demonstrate greater competence in interpreting loops and conditional statements and would have more positive attitudes towards programming. However, differences in performance between the two groups appeared only in the greater ability of the students that learned Scratch to interpret conditional statements. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found that students that learned Logo had on average higher confidence in their ability to program and students were no more likely to plan to continue to program after the course or view the learning of topics as difficult if they learned Logo or Scratch.