The rising cost of learning resources creates obstacles to accessibility in higher education, particularly for students pursuing Computer Science. With the increasing availability and quality of open educational resources (OER), they have gained popularity as potential replacements for traditional paid materials. This study evaluates the effectiveness of an OER interactive textbook (eTextbook) and a paid eTextbook used in undergraduate computing courses. It focuses on students' perceived educational value of each, aiming to provide educators with insights that support informed decisions about course resources. We surveyed undergraduate students at a research-intensive US university who had taken an 'Intro to Programming' course with a free eTextbook and an 'Intro to Data Structures' course with a paid eTextbook to compare their effectiveness by asking students to rate the textbooks independent of the course difficulty. The collected data was analyzed to evaluate the comparative impact of free and paid eTextbooks. Our findings suggest that the OER eTextbook examined in this study can offer educational value comparable to or greater than the paid alternative. While the paid eTextbook was seen as more polished, students appreciated the free eTextbook's interactivity and course-specific customization, highlighting the importance of utility and engagement in learning resources. Although limited to the textbooks studied, our findings highlight the potential for OER to serve as a viable option in undergraduate computing courses. This insight may encourage instructors to consider OER as a cost-effective alternative that enhances accessibility without compromising educational quality.

Recent work has shown that incarcerated adult students reported a decrease in confidence in their ability to do well in the course as the course progressed, whereas non-incarcerated students in a traditional educational setting reported an increase in confidence over time on the same measure. Given these differences in student experiences between incarcerated adult students and traditional students, this work seeks to further understand the experiences of incarcerated adult in CS1, with a focus on their attitudes towards computing. Specifically, we used the Computing Attitude Survey (CAS) as a pre/post measurement in a CS1 course taught in prison. We found significant positive shifts for Problem Solving - Transfer and Fixed Mindset factors and a slight decrease for Real-World Connections. We additionally compare the results of the CAS survey between the incarcerated adult students in this study and those of non-incarcerated students reported in prior work.

Understanding incarcerated adult (IA) students' fears upon entering a CS1 course and how their confidence changes throughout the course can help us understand how well IA students' fears are being addressed, and help future instructors of CS1 in prison address them better. Building on recent work on non-CS majors' fears and confidence in introductory CS, we surveyed 45 IA students across two offerings of a CS1 course in prison on their fears going into the course, and confidence in their ability to succeed. We present a phenomenographic analysis of fears amongst IA students in CS1, and analyze relationships between these fears and change in confidence. In addition, we compare the fears expressed by IA students to those of non-CS majors from prior work. Findings include many IA students reporting no fears, but an overall decrease in confidence across both offerings of the course which was mostly accounted for by students who did express initial fears. We found 9 fears overlapping with those found in a prior study outside of the prison context (e.g., getting a bad grade), and 7 fears only identified in our study (e.g., interference from circumstances beyond my control).

Undergraduate teaching assistants (tutors) are commonly employed in computing courses to help students with programming assignments. Prior research in computing education has reported the benefits of tutoring both for students and for the tutors' own learning. In contrast, recent research that examined actual tutoring sessions has reported that these sessions may be less productive than one might hope, with tutors often just giving students the answers to their problems without trying to teach the underlying concepts. To better understand why tutors may be employing these suboptimal practices, we interviewed ten tutors across early computing courses in higher education to identify their perceived role in these sessions, what stressors and factors influence their ability to perform their job effectively, and what kinds of best practices they learned in their tutor training course. Tutors reported their roles around student learning, gauging student understanding, identifying or providing solutions to students, and providing socioemotional support. They reported their stressors around environmental factors (e.g., number of students waiting to be helped, preparation time, peer-tutor frustrations), internal influences, student behavior, student skill levels, and feeling the need to ''read a student's mind.'' Regarding their tutor training course, Tutors reported learning about interaction guidelines and procedures and question-based problem solving. We conclude by discussing how these results may contribute to the less-effective behaviors seen in prior research and potential ways to improve tutoring in computing courses.

In the United States, culturally relevant computing (CRC) is one of the most popular pedagogical implementations for Latin American (Latine) students. Culturally-relevant learning resources are a valuable tool for implementing CRC. However, the traditional method of creation and maintenance of textbooks takes a significant amount of time and effort. Given the duration required for textbook production, the development of culturally-relevant learning resources may become lengthened, as it requires close attention both on the material and the incorporation of cultural referents. In order to accelerate the process, we used the advancement of large language models (LLMs) to our advantage. Through prompt engineering, we created a series of prompts to produce a textbook for an introductory computer science course (CS1) that incorporates Latine culture. This textbook was evaluated on metrics regarding sensibility, correctness, readability, linguistic approachability, appropriateness of examples, and cultural relevance. Overall, the generated textbook was mainly sensible, correct, readable, and linguistically approachable. Code examples were not always appropriate due to the usage of libraries that are not typically used in a CS1 course. The cultural relevance was apparent, but it often included surface-level cultural referents. The main incorporation of culture was through geographical locations and people's names. This suggests that the use of LLMs to generate textbooks may serve as a valuable first step for writing culturally-relevant learning resources. Though this study focuses on Latines, our results and prompts may be applicable for generating culturally-relevant CS1 textbooks for other cultures.

Though there is a known issue with enrollment disparities across race/ethnicity in computing, U.S. Latin American (Latine) students have remained chronically underrepresented for decades. In order to actively support the recruitment, retention, performance, and experiences of U.S. Latines, we must make sure that we are carrying out studies with this population across outreach practices, interventions, student outcomes, and testimonies. To offer a more comprehensive understanding of the existing body of work on U.S. Latines in computing, we reviewed computing education papers that either fully center around or dedicate specific analyses to U.S. Latines. We analyzed 53 papers and found the following results: most research focuses on Student Experiences and Institutional Perspectives with very few studies on Research Opportunities; the educational setting tended to be K-12 with a severe lack of community college studies; there is a low number of popular pedagogical practices studied with U.S. Latines; research has mainly focused on students, but seldom focused families despite strong Latine connections to family; there was a strong spike in studies in 2021; and the U.S. location of the studies tended to line up with the U.S. Hispanic populations, but many states are under-performing. We discuss the implications of our findings and suggest future research directions to better understand, recruit, and support Latines in computing.