Computing for the Social Good in CS Education (CSG-Ed) is a pedagogy, growing in popularity, that reframes the assignments that students are given to develop their problem solving skills as ones that illustrate computing's social relevance and potential for positive societal impact. However, change, such as adopting a new pedagogy, is hard. Time is limited and workloads are always seemingly increasing, making it easy to forego the investment needed to change. An approach that can help overcome this is the adoption of an entrepreneurial mindset.

There are many excellent reasons for incorporating social good activities throughout our CS curricula. Possibly the most important are the large number of pressing local/global issues facing society (e.g. climate change and related issues) which deserve the attention of the computing community, and in turn, demand the attention of computing educators. In addition, research suggests focusing on how computing can affect the social good can help broaden participation in computing. The problem is many CS educators both don't know where to start or how to create programming assignments around socially relevant themes, and believe that such activities can only be undertaken by advanced students in upper division courses, e.g. software engineering and capstone courses. The purpose of this special session is to equip participants with the easy to learn skills so they can begin incorporating socially relevant assignments/projects throughout the introductory computing sequence.

Historically, student caregivers have been described as parents over the age of 25. However, the role of a caregiver may extend beyond a parental responsibility to include caring for other family members and may include students who are of “traditional college age.” Failing to acknowledge and provide appropriate support for student caregivers can be particularly problematic for students in engineering and computing. Engineering and Computing programs often require extensive work that must be completed outside of class. Meeting these demands is particularly challenging for students with caregiving responsibilities. However, there are significant gaps in our understanding of college experiences and college outcomes of student caregivers enrolled in engineering and computing programs. To understand the experiences of undergraduate student caregivers in engineering and computing fields, this study explored the differences in non-cognitive and affective factors between students who have caregiving responsibilities and those who do not have responsibilities during college. We particularly focused on student caregivers in the College of Engineering at an R1 Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). The context of HSIs is important given that these institutions enroll a large number of post-traditional college students, students who have significant life responsibilities that are often at odds with the demands of college. Additionally, this study incorporates a Hispanic-servingness approach, a framework centered on institutions acknowledging the realities and needs of the students they serve. Using data from a single institution, we asked the following research question: To what extent are caregiving responsibilities related to undergraduate engineering and computing students' non-cognitive and affective factors? Our findings indicate that the experiences of students with caregiving responsibilities differ on five non-cognitive and affective factors: open-mindedness, engineering/computer science identity, help-seeking, motivation, and time management. Taken together, these findings draw attention to the importance of universities taking a holistic approach to developing student support services for Engineering/Computing student caregivers.

There are many excellent reasons for incorporating social good activities throughout our CS curricula. Possibly the most important are the large number of pressing local/global issues facing society (e.g. climate change and related issues)[8] which deserve the attention of the computing community, and in turn, demand the attention of computing educators. In addition, research suggests focusing on how computing can affect the social good can help broaden participation in computing [10, 11].

There are many excellent reasons for incorporating social good activities throughout our CS curricula. Possibly the most important are the large number of pressing local/global issues facing society (e.g. climate change and related issues)[7] which deserve the attention of the computing community, and in turn, demand the attention of computing educators. In addition, research suggests focusing on how computing can affect the social good can help broaden participation in computing[9, 10]. The problem is many CS educators both don't know where to start or how to create programming assignments around socially relevant themes, and believe that such activities can only be undertaken by advanced students in upper division courses, e.g. software engineering and capstone courses. The purpose of this special session is to equip participants with the easy to learn skills so they can begin incorporating socially relevant assignments/projects throughout the introductory computing sequence.

Aspiring software engineers must be able to comprehend and evolve legacy code, which is challenging because the code may be poorly documented, ill structured, and lacking in human support. These challenges of understanding and evolving existing code can be illustrated in academic settings by leveraging the rich and varied volume of Open Source Software (OSS) code. To teach SE with OSS, however, it is necessary to select uniform projects of appropriate size and complexity. This paper reports on our search for suitable OSS projects to teach an introductory SE course with a focus on maintenance and evolution. The search turned out to be quite labor intensive and cumbersome, contrary to our expectations that it would be quick and simple. The chosen projects successfully demonstrated the maintenance challenges, highlighting the promise of using OSS. The burden of selecting projects, however, may impede widespread integration of OSS into SE and other computing courses.

A study was conducted to find out who needed online problem-solving tutors and who benefited from using them. In particular, the study focused on whether there were any significant differences between male and female students and between traditionally represented and under-represented racial groups. Data collected by two Computer Science tutors over multiple semesters was analyzed. The only significant differences found between sexes and racial groups were when female students practiced significantly more concepts because they had solved significantly fewer problems during pre-test, or when they demonstrated greater pre-post increase in score because they had scored significantly less on the pre-test. In both the cases, the tutors helped female students overcome differences in prior preparation vis-a-vis male students. No difference was found between the sexes or racial groups on the number of practice problems solved per practiced concept. Finally, students needed and benefited from the tutors in the same proportion, regardless of sex or racial group.

Social and professional principles were included in ABET computer science accreditation standards in 1987 and first appeared in the ACM/IEEE-CS Computing Curricula in 1991. This moderated panel presented the Social Issues and Professional Practice Knowledge Area (SP KA) of the 2013 ACM/IEEE-CS draft curricular guidelines for computer science. Specific knowledge units from the Ironman version were highlighted for discussion along with course and module exemplars

One implicit purpose of writing software code is to communicate ideas. Commenting source code helps explain these ideas and provides background on the semantics of a program. Yet, enabling students to acquire good commenting practices remains difficult. Instructors can find it hard to meaningfully discuss such practices in both introductory and advanced undergraduate courses. Furthermore, comment grading is an imprecise, labor-intensive procedure at best. But just what practices should we be encouraging students to emulate? To help address these issues (learning about professional code commenting patterns and best practices, objectively grading student comments), we developed the COMTOR tool as an open source project and web service. COMTOR provides a platform for helping assess source code documentation in an objective, structured fashion. We conducted two experiments using COMTOR: one that examines a set of popular open-source Java code projects and one that measures a baseline of student-generated code comments. The latter are based on three semesters worth of data from two different undergraduate courses. Our aim is to extract knowledge about the state of professional practice in source code comments and how these properties vary over the lifetime of a project. We can then begin to make recommendations and communicate best practices (or a lack thereof) to our students.

Few, if any, pedagogical practices exist for helping students embrace best practices in writing software documentation, particularly source code comments. Although instructors often stress the importance of good commenting, two problems exist. First, it can be difficult to actually define these best practices, and second, it can be difficult to grade or assess students' application of such methods/practices. This Birds-of-a-Feather session focuses on capturing for dissemination a concrete list of code commenting best practices used by the attendees as they teach their classes.

The ability to reason with formal logic is a foundational skill for computer scientists and computer engineers that scaffolds the abilities to design, debug, and optimize. By interviewing students about their understanding of propositional logic and their ability to translate from English specifications to Boolean expressions, we characterized common misconceptions and novice problem-solving processes of students who had recently completed a digital logic design class. We present these results and discuss their implications for instruction and the development of pedagogical assessment tools known as concept inventories.

Computing educators are often baffled by the misconceptions that their CS1 students hold. We need to understand these misconceptions more clearly in order to help students form correct conceptions. This paper describes one stage in the development of a concept inventory for Computing Fundamentals: investigation of student misconceptions in a series of core CS1 topics previously identified as both important and difficult. Formal interviews with students revealed four distinct themes, each containing many interesting misconceptions. Three of those misconceptions are detailed in this paper: two misconceptions about memory models, and data assignment when primitives are declared. Individual misconceptions are related, but vary widely, thus providing excellent material to use in the development of the CI. In addition, CS1 instructors are provided immediate usable material for helping their students understand some difficult introductory concepts. Copyright 2010 ACM.

A concept inventory is a standardized assessment tool intended to evaluate a student’s understanding of the core concepts of a topic. In order to create a concept inventory it is necessary to accurately identify these core concepts. A Delphi process is a structured multi-step process that uses a group of experts to achieve a consensus opinion. We present the results of three Delphi processes to identify topics that are important and difficult in each of three introductory computing subjects: discrete mathematics, programming fundamentals, and logic design. The topic rankings can not only be used to guide the coverage of concept inventories, but can also be used by instructors to identify what topics merit special attention.

The ability to reason with formal logic is a foundational skill for computer scientists and computer engineers that scaffolds the abilities to design, debug, and optimize. By interviewing students about their understanding of propositional logic and their ability to translate from English specifications to Boolean expressions, we characterized common misconceptions and novice problem-solving processes of students who had recently completed a digital logic design class. We present these results and discuss their implications for instruction and the development of pedagogical assessment tools known as concept inventories.

A Delphi process is a structured multi-step process that uses a group of experts to achieve a consensus opinion. We present the results of three Delphi processes to identify topics that are important and difficult in each of three introductory computing subjects: discrete math, programming fundamentals, and logic design. The topic rankings can be used to guide both the coverage of standardized tests of student learning (i.e., concept inventories) and can be used by instructors to identify what topics merit emphasis.

The decline in computing enrollments is a global concern that necessitates that every potentially successful computing student be targeted for support and development. The needs of technically experienced, highly capable first-term college students are unique, and no less challenging than the needs of their lesser-prepared peers. In order to attract advanced first-year students to further computing studies, we need to understand better how instruction can meet their needs. This paper reports the results of a study in which advanced first-term computing students were challenged to become in-depth researcher-learners and to teach the content they acquired to their peers. The results demonstrate that students and instructors alike perceive that the students made significant improvements in communication, presentation, and teaming skills and acquired deep content knowledge from their experience in the course. The data also show that students were extremely uncomfortable with the paradigm shift in their learning environment. These results suggest that anxiety-reducing changes are needed for the course, but that overall, the teacher-researcherlearner concept is very beneficial for increasing the understanding and learning of advanced first year computing students.

Instructors of introductory courses face many challenges, not the least of which is dealing with a large volume of course materials and students with differing backgrounds. There are often too many administrative demands to have as much time for creative pedagogy as one would like. Team projects, and complex realistic projects in general, increase psychic demands, and conflicting schedules make creative collaboration with other instructors impossible. In order to address these issues, we need to find ways to increase effective handling of course development, to free up time for creative pedagogical efforts. This paper reports on an exploratory project in which two instructors and an undergraduate teaching assistant used the Subversion version control system to collaborate remotely on developing and running two CS1 classes. We focus on the ease and efficiency of course management using Subversion, providing a new perspective on how version control can enhance teaching.

No abstract available.

Writing skills need to be integrated into the Computer Science (CS) curriculum, and there is little empirical evidence on how best to do so. This paper first describes a technical writing class for CS undergraduates. Then it presents the results of a statistical study that investigated student perceptions of their learning experience in three areas: skill mastery, self-efficacy, and motivation. Positive results support this approach to teaching writing to CS students. Some unexpected findings in all three areas highlight why monitoring student perceptions is important for CS educators.

Distance Education (D.E.) is changing fundamental debates about academic integrity and rigor. The role of teaching and learning is being discussed with respect to both accreditation and student assessment. Evidence suggests that popular methods of student assessment in D.E. differ little from traditional methods. Studies of cheating in D.E. show that perceptions do not match reality. Accrediting agencies are grappling with an inherent educational paradigm shift. Beliefs about professional autonomy and academic freedom may be affected. Computer Scientists are in a unique position to understand the implications of this technology-driven debate. We need to educate ourselves about these issues and make our voices heard.

No abstract available.