Computing is everywhere, and it's here to stay. Computing is crucial in many disciplines and influences every discipline. It's unlikely we'll willingly return to a society unmediated by computing. How do our institutions proceed?

Course design and oversight is difficult, and we've seen a move toward including undergraduates on course staff over the past several years. In this panel, we argue that giving additional autonomy to the undergraduates involved in our courses is both empowering to them and beneficial to the course itself (as their perspective having actually taken the course can help us understand inequities and/or confusing pieces of the curriculum).

For a decade, our institution has offered both a biology-based CS1 (CS1-B) and a traditional, breadth-based CS1. This project follows the paths of students in both courses -- tracking their subsequent interests (what courses do the two groups choose afterwards') and their grades in those courses. Within the biology-based cohort, we also contrast the futures of the students who chose a biology-themed introduction with the group who expressed no preference or requested the breadth-based approach. Even when student preference was not accommodated, equitable downstream performance results hold. We discuss the implications of these results, including the possibility that, like introductory writing, introductory computing is a professional literacy in which many disciplines have a stake.

ColorFight AI is a game designed to be a machine learning platform, but instead it illustrates how machine learning is not always the most effective way to implement an AI agent. Although the game is designed to be played by ML algorithms, AIs designed to follow an adhoc strategy have, to date, been more effective. This does not at all mean that ML is ineffective-or could not be developed to discover the same strategy-but it does sound a note of caution as more and more tasks are handed to machine learning for optimization.

This paper builds on research done at our institution for an aspect of an REU summer program. Several Computer Science students tested avenues for varying complexities of game design and drew predictions and conclusions of their potential implementation into other academic disciplines. We look to Media Studies as one field with encouraging prospects for overlap, and discuss plans for a pilot course in Media Studies at a partnering institution for Spring 2020 which would make use of this possibility. Using this course as a model, we draw conclusions about the prospects, as well as possible limitations of computing as a peripheral to other academic fields, keeping in mind the importance of maintaining academic identity for all cooperating disciplines across the board.

CS majors are certainly not disappearing, but the interest and demand for computing from non-CS majors is a far larger part of our future, as members of CS departments, than those on the disciplinary-major path. As computing evolves from valuable specialty to a professional literacy, CS departments face several challenges. How do we support both the traditional CS-major path and provide computing curriculum to a far broader audience? How do we partner with sibling departments in order to foster their sense of ownership and identity with computing's mindsets and toolsets? And, perhaps especially poignant in 2018, how do we invest energy into the CS-for-All future during a time that demand in our major pathway is at historic highs? This workshop distills the experiences of three faculty members who have tried to answer these questions within the context of their departments. The presenters will share the results of those experiments, will offer hands-on exploration of a representative subset of the curricular materials, and will scaffold a strategic discussion of CS's future and identity in the era of "CS for All."

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.

"CS for All" has set computer science on an unusual journey. Literacies are skills asked of us all: thus, "CS for All" identifies computing skills as a full-fledged human literacy. Yet, Computer Science departments are not uniformly ready to build a computing literacy for all students. This project has investigated on how different institutions are coping with this challenge.

In 2015-16, San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) piloted MyCS, a Middle-years CS curriculum, in half of its middle schools. This unexpected launch led naturally to diverging curricular branches: one that evolved within the district, another used by schools with the program already in place. The summer after the pilot, SFUSD's and MyCS's stewards convened for a week of feedback, PD, and planning. This poster highlights the curricular refinements, preliminary assessment results, and institutional changes that came from this curricular divergence and subsequent reconciliation. The data analyzed include teacher- and district-feedback, along with an analysis of student responses from SF's pilot implementation. Though accidental, this experiment suggests that substantial benefit can come from independently co-evolving (branching) and then reconciling (merging) curricula. When merged, those otherwise independent branches create a community both stronger and more invested for all of its stakeholders.

This paper shares the five-year development and deployment of MyCS, a CS curriculum for "middle-years students," roughly in US grades 4-10. Consistent with many middle-years curricula, MyCS promotes positive individual identification with its field, CS, especially as it intersects with other facets of students' maturing identities. A detailed assessment of students' MyCS experiences reveal significant positive outcomes relative to a control group, as well as many neutral (no-distinction) results relative to the control. Feedback from teacher and administrators have refined MyCS and, perhaps more importantly, built curricular bridges to both elementary- and high-school CS. By tracing MyCS's assessment and evolution, this work highlights how two districts used a middle-years CS foothold from which to establish deeper, district-wide changes in identity.

In this poster we present a CS curriculum aimed at "middle-years" students. In the U.S., this corresponds roughly to students aged 11-15. This MyCS curriculum provides a hands-on introduction to computer science through six distinct modules. Three programming modules use the Scratch environment to build computational sophistication and procedural intuition within an inviting development environment. Alternating with Scratch are three problem-solving modules whose activities deepen awareness and facility with computation through novel exercises. More than 25 classrooms and 900 students have participated in MyCS's pilot years within the Pomona, CA and Lihue, HI school districts. 2013-15 will see an expansion of its workshops, academic-year classes, and program evaluation. Course materials will be served by the OpenEdX platform both at HMC and on Amazon EC2. This poster shares our development and deployment of MyCS to date, and invites feedback from other institutions in their efforts to foster adolescents' computational identities.

This paper describes the MyCS curriculum, which aims to encourage middle-years students, i.e., grades 4-10, to engage not only as consumers of CS, but as composers of computational artifacts. MyCS draws from many successful online tools and curricula, including Exploring Computer Science (ECS) and Scratch. MyCS's 18-week curriculum balances a broad treatment of the modern role of the computer with deepening students' hands-on skills through computational problem-solving, both unplugged and via programming. This paper summarizes assessments from several MyCS professional-development workshops, with an emphasis on eliciting teachers' needs and goals for their classrooms. In addition, we discuss the project's future in the format of a teacher-mediated MOOC that will enable a larger group of teachers to engage their students in CS.

In this poster we present a CS curriculum aimed at "middle-years" students. In the U.S., this corresponds roughly to middle school and early high-school, i.e., students aged 11-15. This MyCS curriculum provides a hands-on introduction to computer science through six distinct modules. Three programming modules use the Scratch environment to build computational sophistication and procedural intuition within an inviting development environment. Alternating with Scratch are three problem-solving modules whose activities deepen awareness and facility with computation through novel and adapted exercises. By carefully integrating novel activities with a targeted subset of the excellent resources from ECS, AP CS Principles, webdev tools, and CS unplugged, MyCS enables middle-school teachers without prior CS training to offer an 18-week course after only one week of summertime professional development. More than 25 classrooms and 900 students have participated in MyCS's pilot years within the Pomona, CA and Lihue, HI school districts. 2013-15 will see an expansion of its workshops, academic-year classes, and program evaluation. This poster shares our development and deployment of MyCS to date, and it invites feedback from the experiences of other institutions, worldwide, in their efforts to foster adolescents' computational identities.

MyCS (Middle-years Computer Science) is a one-semester CS curriculum that engages middle schoolers in computational skill-building. Scratch programming serves as a touchstone throughout the eighteen-week syllabus. Students punctuate that foundation with hands-on activities leveraged from excellent resources such as Exploring Computer Science, CS Principles, webdev tools, and CS unplugged. Over twenty classrooms and 700 students participated in MyCS's pilot years within the Pomona, CA and Lihue, HI school districts; 2013-15 will see an NSF-supported expansion of its summer workshops, academic-year classes, and program evaluation. This poster highlights our experiences developing MyCS, deploying it widely, and soliciting feedback on students' evolving computational identities.

After many years, the robotics research community has settled on standard middleware: the Robot Operating System (ROS). This standard presents a great opportunity for educational robotics. This hands-on workshop will engage participants in ROS-based curricula for CS 02 and advanced undergraduates. The workshop will highlight how ROS has simplified, enabled, and expanded flipped robotics curricula in CS 02. Our advanced materials show how ROS enables easy access to the robotics research community, permitting larger and more research-representative projects. This workshop is two long hands-on sessions punctuated with short reports from the presenters' experience. Participants will implement the first two assignments of our CS 2 curriculum. http://www.cs.hmc.edu/dodds/ROSatSIGCSE2013.

We present the curriculum, deployment, and initial evaluation of a course, BioCS1, designed to serve as an introductory course in both biology and CS. Co-taught by professors in both fields, BioCS1 interweaves fundamental biology and computational topics in a manner similar to contextual approaches to CS1. In contrast to other contextual approaches, however, BioCS1 emphasizes both CS and its context equally. The results suggest that such cross-disciplinary collaborations can thrive at the introductory level, just as they have later in the curriculum.

The Microsoft Kinect and Willow Garage's Robot Operating System (ROS) are changing the way robots are developed. Together, these tools can enable today's CS educators to provide richer and more research-representative experiences with robots and perception. This hands-on workshop will introduce ROS and showcase two pilot courses taught using ROS and the Kinect. Four 20-minute talks will intersperse with participants' hands-on development of Python programs on low-cost Kinect-equipped robots and the ARDrone quadcopter. This workshop is intended for all college-level CS educators interested in robotics or embodied AI. First-time ROS/Kinect users are particularly welcome! Laptops and robots will be provided. See http://www.ros.org/wiki/Courses/sigcse2012. Laptops optional.

The flexibility and controllability of quadrotor helicopters have made them a recent focus of interest among robotics and AI research groups. At the same time, their popularity has led to a wide range of commercially available platforms, some at prices accessible for undergraduate educational use. This project evaluates the ARDrone quadrotor helicopter as a basis for use in undergraduate classes such as robotics, computer vision, or embodied AI. We have encountered both successes and frustrations in using the ARDrone to date. Looking forward, the quadrotor’s capabilities do seem a promising basis for future curricular offerings.

Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee... - Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844. At the SIGCSE Symposium in 2007, we presented a panel in which seasoned teaching faculty from four large, PhD-granting universities shared the teaching tips we wished we'd known before starting our careers [1]. The difference from earlier Teaching Tips panels [6] was that our suggestions were meant to be gems less often highlighted by our colleagues or by some of the best-known teaching resources [2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11]. We clustered our tips into several categories: Lecturing, Office (hours), Staff (mentoring), Exams (authoring & administering), Labs (authoring & running), Section (TA-led discussion), Projects (and homework; authoring & supporting), and Meta (advice spanning categories). The session was received quite well, and the audience contributed many of their own teaching tips throughout the presentation. Since all of the presenters in 2007 regularly taught large, hundred-student classes, many of their suggestions (e.g., lecturing in a large venue or managing an army of teaching assistants) were not relevant to the experience of teaching small classes. Quite a few attendees suggested there be a follow-up session with presenters who could address the challenges specific to small college or university classes. To that end, we present the Small College Class edition, with seasoned educators who have expertise teaching smaller classes at their university or college. The position statements that follow offer a random sampling of two of these hidden pearls; presenters will share many more during the session, and time will be provided for audience participation. We'll endeavor to capture all the tips for an online collection. Complementing the categories above, we have added two more that capture the intimate setting of small classes: - Classroom (organization, interactions, and incentives) - Personal (fostering relationships).

In 2010 a new annual symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI) was launched as part of the AAAI annual meeting. The event was held in cooperation with ACM SIGCSE and has many similar goals related to broadening and disseminating work in computer science education. EAAI has a particular focus, however, as the event is specific to educational work in Artificial Intelligence and collocated with a major research conference (AAAI) to promote more interaction between researchers and educators in that domain. This panel seeks to introduce participants to EAAI as a way of fostering more interaction between educational communities in computing. Specifically, the panel will discuss the goals of EAAI, provide an overview of the kinds of work presented at the symposium, and identify potential synergies between that EAAI and SIGCSE as a way of better linking the two communities going forward.

We present the curriculum, deployment, and initial evaluation of a course, BioCS1, designed to serve as CS1 and Biology1 for majors of either (or both) disciplines. Cotaught by professors in both fields, BioCS1 interweaves fundamental biology and computational topics in a manner similar to contextual approaches to CS1. In contrast to other contextual approaches, however, BioCS1 emphasizes both CS and its context equally. The results suggest that cross-disciplinary collaborations can succeed at the introductory level, as they have at later stages of the curriculum.

Historically, Harvey Mudd College (HMC) has had very little success attracting women to the study of computer science: women have chosen CS less than any other field of study. In 2006 HMC began three practices in order to increase the number of women studying and majoring in CS; these practices have now been in place for 3 years. With this paper we describe these practices and present a thorough evaluation of the quantitative and qualitative differences that have accompanied them. In sum, these efforts have rebalanced our department by significantly increasing women's participation in our computer science program.

This paper presents a thorough evaluation of CS for Scientists, a CS 1 course designed to provide future scientists with an overview of the discipline. The course takes a breadth-first approach that leverages its students' interest and experience in science, mathematics, and engineering. In contrast to many other styles of CS 1, this course does not presume that its students will study more computer science, but it does seek to prepare them should they choose to. We summarize the past year's worth of assessments of student learning, retention, and affect -- with particular attention paid to women's voices. Where possible, we contrast these student measures with those from a traditional, imperative-first CS1 that this new course replaced. The data thus far suggest that CS for Scientists significantly improves students' understanding of CS, its applications, and practice.

Abstract—This paper presents the iRobot corporation’s Roomba vacuum as a low-cost resource for robotics research and education. Sensor and actuation models for unmodified Roombas are presented in the context of both special- and general-purpose spatial-reasoning algorithms, including Monte Carlo Localization and FastSLAM. Further tests probe the feasibility of sensor extensions to the platform. Results demonstrate that, with some caveats, the Roomba is a viable foundation for both classroom and laboratory use, especially for work seeking to leverage robots to other ends, as well as robotics per se with a computational focus. I.

This paper describes an introductory CS course designed to provide future scientists with a one-semester overview of the discipline. The course takes a breadth-first approach that leverages its students' interest and experience in science, mathematics, and engineering. In contrast to many other styles of CS 1, this course does not presume that its students will study more computer science, but it does seek to prepare them should they choose to do so. In addition to describing the curriculum and resources, we summarize our preliminary assessments of this course and a comparison with the more traditional, imperative-first introduction it replaced. The data thus far suggest that this CS for Scientists course improves our students' understanding of CS, its applications, and practice.

This paper tracks the five-year growth and current trajectory of a computational outreach program at a small, liberal-arts college. The program has enhanced opportunities for talented high-school students to experience computation more deeply than their HS curriculum currently offers. This outreach evolved from a naive initial premise into a mutually beneficial interaction between an undergraduate computer science department and a local secondary school. The most important factor in the program's sustainability is a supportive liaison within the high school's administration. We hope the lessons we have learned will help other CS departments develop sustainable outreach programs.

For more than a decade the capabilities of incompletely calibrated stereo systems have been formally characterized. These characterizations provide theoretical limits on the tasks that visually guided robotic systems can achieve. Within these limits there are several feature-alignment tasks whose image-space representations are inherently discontinuous, including collinearity and coplanarity. This paper presents smooth, locally convergent image-space approximations for such tasks. In addition, we propose the general notion of a "safe" image-based approximation to spatial tasks, in which complete image-space characterization is sacrificed in return for partial characterization along with local controllability. As a result, this article bridges the gap between theoretically specifiable tasks and locally controllable tasks for common stereovisual servoing systems.

A long-standing goal in image-based modeling and rendering is to capture a scene from camera images and construct a sufficient model to allow photo-realistic rendering of new views. With the confluence of computer graphics and vision, the combination of research on recovering geometric structure from un-calibrated cameras with modeling and rendering has yielded numerous new methods. Yet, many challenging issues remain to be addressed before a sufficiently general and robust system could be built to (for instance) allow an average user to model their home and garden from camcorder video. This tutorial aims to give researchers and students in computer graphics a working knowledge of relevant theory and techniques covering the steps from real-time vision for tracking and the capture of scene geometry and appearance, to the efficient representation and real-time rendering of image-based models. It also includes hands-on demos of real-time visual tracking, modeling and rendering systems.

Vision-based control has aimed to develop general-purpose, high accuracy systems for manipulating objects. While much of the scientific and technological infrastructure needed to accomplish this aim is now in place, several stumbling blocks still remain. One continuing issue is accuracy, and its relationship to system calibration. We describe a generative task structure for vision-based control of motion that admits a simple, geometric approach to task specification. At the same time, this approach allows one to state precisely what types of miscalibration lead to errors in task performance. A second hurdle has been the programmability of hand-eye systems. However, we argue that a structured object representation sufficient for flexible hand-eye coordination is a possibility. The result is a high-level, object-centered language for expressing hand-eye tasks.

Most of the work in robotic manipulation and visual servoing has emphasized how to specify and perform particular tasks. Recent results have formally shown what tasks are possible with uncalibrated imaging systems. This paper extends those results by characterizing in a constructive manner the set of tasks which can be performed with different types of uncalibrated camera models. The tasks resulting structure provides a principle foundation both for a specification language and for automatic execution monitoring in uncalibrated environments.

Over the last several years, there has been an increasing appreciation of the impact of control architecture on the accuracy of visual servoing systems. In particular, it is generally acknowledged that so-called image-based methods provide the highest guarantees of accuracy on inaccurately calibrated hand-eye systems. Less clear is the impact of the control architecture on the set of tasks which the system can perform. In this article, we present a formal analysis of control architectures for hand-eye coordination. Specifically, we first state a formal characterization of what makes a task performable under three possible encoding methods. Then, for the specific case of cameras modeled using projective geometry, we relate this characterization to notions of projective invariance and demonstrate the limits of achievable performance in this regard.