Teaching assistants (TAs) play a critical role in computing and HCI education, yet little is known about how they perceive and use AI tools or imagine their future pedagogical uses. We report on a series of design workshops with 131 computing (CS) TAs across two U.S. universities. These workshops invited TAs to reflect on current AI use and envision future AI-enhanced tools and practices. Drawing on surveys and design artifacts, we (1) develop a cross-institutional typology of situated TA uses of AI, revealing opportunities and tensions; (2) show how TAs’ visions of AI are shaped by disciplinary norms, institutional structures, and their intermediary position as student-instructors; and (3) reveal ethical dilemmas. Our findings contribute to HCI by positioning TAs as AI-supported knowledge workers in the education domain; illustrating how design and speculation are shaped by people’s situated understandings of AI and their institutional contexts; and identifying a core tension in which TAs simultaneously preserve and erode the human dimensions of their work, with implications for future instructional tools and human–AI collaboration.

This poster describes a single-session module for an undergraduate computing ethics course focused on generative AI (GenAI) use in higher education. The session asks students to reflect on both their own use (or non-use) of GenAI as well as that of their instructors. Details of the session, including pre-reading, session topics, and reflection questions, are included so the module may be repeated at other institutions. In the discussion, I examine the importance of computing ethics instructors as models for ethical technology use in the classroom.

Ethics instruction, as required for ABET-accreditation and recommended by the ACM/IEEE-CS/AAAI curricular guidelines, is an important element of the undergraduate computer science (CS) curriculum. Recent papers which analyze the proportion of programs offering CS ethics education focus on specific types of programs, such as top-ranked programs, programs at R1 institutions under the Carnegie Classification, and/or ABET-accredited programs. This leaves out a large portion of CS programs which may fall under none of those categories including many small colleges. In this paper, we analyze a true random sample of all 4-year Bachelor's, Public or Private Not-For-Profit CS programs in the U.S. to assess the extent to which the previous data holds true across the full spectrum of U.S. colleges and universities. Using a systematic approach, we look at which CS programs require CS ethics instruction, whether as a standalone course or integrated into other courses. In addition, we break down the data by categorization to replicate previous studies and place our data in conversation with those. We found 55% of all U.S. CS programs require CS ethics in some capacity. Additionally, we found ABET-accreditation and Carnegie research classification to be a major driver toward programs requiring ethics instruction in the U.S.

Teaching assistants (TAs) play an increasingly vital role in computer science (CS) education, particularly amid rising enrollments, expanding instructional modalities, and the emergence of generative AI tools. In this evolving landscape, CS TAs are taking on greater responsibilities and often serve as the primary point of personal interaction for students, particularly through recitations, lab sessions, and office hours. However, many CS TAs receive limited preparation in inclusive and responsive teaching practices, limiting their ability to effectively support students from diverse cultural and educational backgrounds. To address this gap, we developed and delivered a series of responsive pedagogy workshops at two diverse institutions. These workshops aimed to deepen CS TAs' understanding of inclusive and responsive teaching strategies, support their implementation in practice, and create space for co-design by positioning TAs not only as learners, but as partners in imagining how responsive pedagogy principles could be more effectively integrated into the courses and contexts in which they teach. In this experience report, we describe the design and implementation of these workshops with 117 TA participants, share workshop materials for broader adoption, and reflect on key findings related to integrating responsive pedagogy into CS education through TA training.

This Birds of a Feather (BoF) session serves to build a community of graduate student researchers in Computer Science Education (CSEd) at SIGCSE TS and beyond. Many graduate students lack a CSEd research community within their own institution. This BoF session will serve to provide a space for SIGCSE TS graduate students to build their community across institutions, both during and after the conference. During the session, we will discuss the successes and challenges that come with being a CSEd graduate student, including work/life balance, advisor-student relationships, and developing collaborations. Attendees will leave with an opportunity to connect with other CSEd graduate students beyond the conference through a dedicated CSEd graduate student Slack channel.

Computing ethics instruction is a vital aspect of the undergraduate computing curriculum. It has received greater focus in recent years driven in part by concerns about the societal impacts of computing technologies such as social media and artificial intelligence. The increased attention provides an opportunity, even an imperative, to examine and rethink common practices. To support our understanding of current practices in computing ethics education, we surveyed 318 computing educators in the United States (U.S.), including 56 who have never taught ethics. The survey included questions about ethics teaching methods and challenges the instructors confronted. We show that ethical frameworks are frequently taught yet teaching them is regarded as one of the least important learning outcomes, and that respondents largely do not consider author demographics when selecting readings for their ethics classes, which could limit the diversity in perspectives present in the course. We conclude with recommendations for improving teaching methods, materials selection, and deployment strategies in computing ethics education, and discuss their implications for promoting more inclusive computing ethics education curricula in the U.S.

Computer Science (CS) ethics coursework is required at many institutions for undergraduate CS majors. However, little is known about how students perceive the addition of this topic into the CS curriculum which is otherwise largely technical in nature. To understand perceptions of CS ethics as a course, we included questions about CS ethics instruction on a survey of 88 graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs) at two institutions in the United States. We found that learning CS ethics was not a universal experience for all TAs, but that a majority of TAs felt that CS ethics is a vital curricular topic. We recommend further research with a wider study population to better understand the perceptions of students of CS ethics coursework.

Recently, there has been a growing interest in the role of teaching assistants (TAs) in computer science (CS). This interest is due to the vital role CS TAs play in supporting student learning and their expanding responsibilities driven by growing enrollments in CS programs worldwide. While much of this research focuses on the technical and pedagogical aspects of CS TAs' duties, researchers recognize the need to further explore the unique value human CS TAs provide, particularly with the rise of AI tools and assistants. In this paper, we use qualitative methods to analyze 109 survey responses collected across two different institutions in the United States as part of a larger design-based research project to make two contributions. First, we illustrate how CS TAs adopt humanistic stances and demonstrate care in their roles, thereby expanding prevailing understandings of CS TAs. Second, we detail similarities and differences across CS TAs' experiences at each institution that underscore the importance of understanding CS TAs as they are situated in different institutional contexts. We conclude by discussing implications of this work for computing instruction and TA training, emphasizing the importance of foregrounding the roles and values brought by TAs.

Computing Ethics (CE) courses are an increasingly important component of the undergraduate computing curriculum because of the outsized influence of computing on society. CE encompasses topics from multiple disciplines including the humanities; however, it is typically taught by educators within a Computer Science (CS) department in most undergraduate institutions in the United States, potentially leading to a less than comprehensive CE education for students. We surveyed 318 computing educators in US higher education to investigate CS educators' perceptions of how CE topics should ideally be taught. Most of our respondents thought that CE should be taught by a multidisciplinary team of instructors, and further that it should be taught both as a standalone course and embedded in other courses. Our research provides insights into ways to improve CE education that result in a better student experience.

Computing ethics courses are generally considered essential in undergraduate programs, but there is limited research on the importance of their inclusion at the master's level. In this study, we extend research conducted by Dexter et al. in 2013 about the importance of ethics in master's programs. We surveyed Associate Chairs and Associate Deans of Graduate Studies representing 81 different computing programs in the United States. 72% of respondents shared that ethics should be required in master's computing programs. In contrast, only 46% of the 81 programs surveyed require any type of ethics course at the master's level. Our findings also uncover barriers to the inclusion of ethics at the master's level and propose strategies for alleviating these challenges.

Afterschool programs routinely provide or supplement Computer Science (CS) education to K-12 students in the United States. However, such opportunities are rarely available to students from low-income communities due to limited computing resources and CS instructors. One strategy for increasing access to instructors in such settings is to train afterschool staff to teach CS to students in their programs. To investigate the viability of this approach, we recruited and trained three afterschool staff with little prior computing experience to teach their students block programming. We analyzed data from teaching observations and survey-based teaching reflections to understand high-level challenges to this strategy. We found that instructors internalized students' successes and failures as reflections of their own CS teaching ability, and they sometimes struggled to adapt the structured teaching materials to the informal nature of afterschool programs. We reflect on the consequences of these insights and suggest strategies to increase access to CS instructors in low-income afterschool settings.

In this Birds of a Feather (BoF) session, we aim to foster a safe and open environment that allows CS education (CSEd) graduate students to share about their graduate experiences and learn from each other about graduate school, conducting research, and navigating the inherently multi-disciplinary space of CSEd. We have two main goals: (1) create specific networking opportunities between CSEd graduate students attending SIGCSE TS (hereafter just "SIGCSE") in order to foster a community of support, and (2) elicit discussions on the triumphs and tribulations that come as part of being a CSEd-focused graduate student. We plan for all attendees to leave our session with connections to fellow CSEd graduate students from other institutions (through email and a dedicated Slack) and a greater awareness of the community available to them within CS education research.

We want to facilitate an interactive gathering of faculty from a variety of disciplines and institutions - including primary, secondary, and tertiary schools - who are interested in exchanging ideas related to the learning and teaching of ethical concepts and skills in a CS or related curriculum, and evaluating the success of those efforts. We understand "curriculum" broadly to include both course and lab instruction and out-of-class experiences. Participants will leave with a set of open-access teaching resources, guidance for how best to use those resources at their own institutions, and ideas for evaluating any courses, curriculum, or programs they develop as a result.