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.

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.

This article presents a novel hardware description language (HDL) and associated 4-week assignment sequence for a computer architecture course, with discussion of our experience developing and using these tools. At our institution, CS majors take a different computer architecture course than computer engineering majors. The CS majors' course aims to providestudents with an understanding of how nontrivial processors can be built out of simple hardware components. To leverage students' existing familiarity with programming languages, we wanted students to manipulate processor designs using a text-based hardware description language (HDL). We did not, however, want to devote instructional time to the low level complexities like clocking choices or arithmetic logic design. We developed an instructional hardware description language and associated assignments based on Bryant & O'Halleron's HCL (and designed to be compatible with their text) with some inspiration from Verilog. Unlike HCL, our HDL allows students with flexibility to build and simulate different processor organizations - for example, pipeline designs with different pipeline stages as well as non-pipelined designs - without the differences being hidden in the internal components of the simulator. By specializing for building a processor, our tooling prominently to students and our testing infrastructure how their simulated processors executed programs. Also, using simple enforcement of signal widths and avoiding floating or undefined values, our HDL design helped catch many students errors while still seeming to treat all values as bits. We also discuss our experience teaching a course using these tools to several hundred students a semester for the last eight years.We evaluate our experience through a review of student and instructor feedback, which suggest increased student and instructor satisfaction and that the HDL and assignments provide a solid basis for explaining later topics such as superscalar processors and processor-aware software optimization.

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.

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.

We present an eight-year curriculum redesign effort impacting al-most every course in our computer science department. Having not made a major update to our curriculum in two decades, complications began to arise from significant increases in enrollment and instituting multiple degrees in computing in the same department. Starting from a desire to adjust a few courses, we systematically collected a broad set of requirements and blue-sky ideas from many stakeholders, resulting in an unsatisfiable set of content, ordering, and course boundary constraints. After multiple rounds of conversation with our stakeholders in and out of the department, we evolved and relaxed several of our constraints, allowing us to develop a compromise plan for seven new courses and a new prerequisite system. We then piloted five of the new courses and collected feedback on results, iterating on these courses each semester for two years. We worked with registrars, advisors, and administrators to develop a transition plan from old to new courses. This paper presents highlights of each step of this process, a summary of the resulting curriculum design, and reflections and recommendations for other departments that may want to undertake a similar update.

This poster presents pilot results of a professional development (PD) workshop designed by a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) that focused on helping K-8 teachers integrate computer science (CS) concepts into other content areas using culturally responsive teaching (CRT) strategies. Preliminary results demonstrate that teachers significantly improved their self-efficacy to teach CS and self-confidence to use CRT in CS after the 4-week workshop. Results suggest that K-8 teachers can greatly benefit from PD experiences that focus on equitable CS instruction and pedagogy.

The past thirty years have seen many advances in our understanding of issues that impede diversity, as well as interventions that can remove or mitigate those impediments. The advances are generally presented in psychology journals and are under-consumed by computing educators, leading to the need for diversity training tailored to said educators. We have hundreds of hours of experience providing diversity training to computing educators, and have learned many lessons about how training should and should not be delivered to engage participants in understanding diversity-impeding forces and implementing interventions to improve the attraction and retention of diverse students. This paper is a collection of those lessons learned. We focus on concrete approaches to presenting material rather than on training organization or content, including a dozen specific practices that have proven particularly effective or ineffective in reaching diverse audiences. Examples include how how to avoid offending participants, how to help experts not lose their audience, how to pace and organize material for maximum impact, how we tie many topics into a single cognitive framework, and how we've learned to handle participant-raised objections. We also include commentary as to why we believe they did or did not work. We also describe possible future research to validate and expand on our observations and a few open questions for diversity training.

This Research Full Paper reports the results of a 30-item survey of students in three large-enrollment introductory CS courses in the Fall semester of 2017. This survey was designed to provide insight into the perceptions and motivation differences between students from underrepresented minorities in the field of computing (CS-URMs) and CS non-URMs in large-enrollment introductory computer science (CS) courses. Its focus is on how diverse learners engage in the course and how students from diverse backgrounds (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity) perceive large-enrollment college introductory CS courses that incorporate collaborative learning activities. Survey items were adapted from four validated instruments. Survey responses from 517 students suggest significant differences between CS-URM and CS non-URM students in their perceptions of collaborative learning and instructor support. CS-URMs students' motivation was significantly higher than CS non-URMs. The study findings have implications for how to engage diverse learners in introductory computing courses. The paper provides suggestions for designing CS introductory courses to be more inclusive learning environments for all.

Although computing occupations increasingly dominate the workforce, the computing discipline does not attract sufficient and diverse students to meet societal workforce needs. LIGHTHOUSE FOR CS is a collection of professional development efforts seeking to increase computing diversity through faculty education. LIGHTHOUSE CC provides an open online course extending a decade of successful face-to-face TAPESTRY workshops. LIGHTHOUSE CC targets community college computing faculty, building off of research suggesting that online professional development can be as effective as in-person professional development. We believe it is one of the first attempts to validate that finding for community college computing faculty. The paper examines participant motivations and perceptions of online and face-to-face diversity-focused professional development for community college computing educators. To meet the needs of the community college computing faculty, we began with a needs assessment survey. Its feedback and prior face-to-face workshop experiences were integrated with several instructional design principles and theories to engage community college faculty, notably the ARCS motivational design model (Keller, 1987) and the Community of Practice model (Wenger, 1998). Project analyses involved both surveys and focus group interviews. The paper also provides directions for future improvements and suggestions for others who are considering online or diversity-focused professional development.

Computing occupations increasingly dominate the workforce, but the discipline fails to attract sufficient and diverse students (i.e., women, underrepresented minorities) to meet workforce needs. To address this issue, LIGHTHOUSE projects provide computer science instructors with professional development MOOCs to recruit and retain more and diverse students in computing. We present how a professional development MOOC has been designed with relevant instructional design principles and theories to suit community college computer science instructors' learning needs. In this paper we share results from a needs assessment survey that, along with the relevant instructional theories and design principles, guided the design of an innovative diversity-focused online professional development learning environment.

A great CS assignment is a delight to all, but the path to one can be most roundabout. Many CS students have had their characters built up on assignments that worked better as an idea than as an actual assignment. Assignments are hard to come up with, yet they are the key to student learning. The Nifty Assignments special session is all about promoting and sharing the ideas and ready-to-use materials of successful assignments.

During the summer of 2011, twenty-four high school students participated in an intense, three-week computer science course at the University of Virginia. The course met for twenty-one three-hour sessions, thus encompassing more contact time than a standard college-level course. The course was structured in an “Inform, Experience, Implement” active-learning format: students were exposed to the history of a particular problem in context and participated in an active learning lesson regarding the topic before learning how to address the examined problem through programming. This structure helped integrate into the course best practices from experiential learning, kinesthetic outreach activities, and active learning pedagogy. Utilizing this three-part rotation curriculum achieved some important goals, including holding the interest of students during the summer for six hours a day and successfully motivating students who had no programming background.

Traditional introductory programming classes teach sequential programming using a single-threaded programming model. It is typical to wait until a student has developed proficiency in sequential programming before teaching parallel programming. As computer hardware becomes increasingly parallel, there is a greater need for software engineers who are proficient in designing parallel programs, and not just by "parallelizing" sequential designs. Teaching parallelism first is an important step towards educating tomorrow's programmers.

An effective CS1 approach has been developed for encouraging diverse students without prior computer science experiences to select computing majors. Separation of CS1 sections by prior experience level concentrates diverse students in the inexperienced section. Within that section we use several techniques to increase student comprehension and participation, including an integrated lecture/lab, many small examples and assignments, student participation, etc. We discuss the approach and evaluate its performance over a four-year time period.

Most autonomous mobile agents operate in a highly constrained environment. Despite significant research, existing solutions are limited in their ability to handle heterogeneous constraints within highly dynamic or uncertain environments. This paper presents a novel maneuver selection technique suited for both 2D and 3D environments with highly dynamic maneuvering constraints and multiple mobile obstacles. Agents may have any arbitrary set of nonholonomic control variables; maneuvers can be constrained by a broad class of function inequalities, including time-dependent constraints involving nonlinear relationships between controlled and agent-state variables. The resulting algorithm has been implemented to run in real time using only a fraction of the CPU's capacity on an ordinary notebook computer and performs well in a number of taxing simulated situations.