Previous research argues that liberal arts computer science programs are defining new directions for curricula based on distinctive features of their institutional and/or departmental identity. These innovations, and the approach to curricular design that inform them, can inspire curricular innovation at large universities, community colleges, and K-12 institutions. This panel illustrates an approach to curriculum design based on institutional and/or departmental identity with specific examples from four programs. It will guide audience members to consider distinctive features of their program context and how that can influence their curricula.

ACM/IEEE curriculum guidelines for computer science, such as CS2013 or the forthcoming CS2023, provide well-researched and detailed guidance about the content and skills that make up an undergraduate computer science (CS) program. Liberal arts CS programs often struggle to apply these guidelines within their institutional context and goals. Historically, this has been addressed through the development of model CS curricula tailored for the liberal arts context. We take a different position: that no single model curriculum can apply across the wide range of liberal arts institutions. Instead, we argue that liberal arts CS educators need best practices for using guidelines such as CS2023 to inform curriculum design. These practices must acknowledge the opportunities and priorities of a liberal arts philosophy as well as a program's mission and identity. This paper reviews the context and motivation behind computing in the liberal arts. We also review the history of liberal arts CS educators and ACM/IEEE curriculum guidelines. We present data and trends about liberal arts computing programs, discussing how this informs curriculum design. Finally, we propose a process that guides programs to work with curriculum guidelines through the lens of institutional and program missions and identities, goals, and situational factors.

This panel provides examples of how faculty refine, expand, and evaluate initiatives to broaden participation in computing using the Data Buddies Survey (https://cra.org/cerp/data-buddies). The Computing Research Association administers the survey annually and prepares summary reports for over 140 member institutions. Participation is free, and the survey gathers information about students' educational experiences, confidence, attitudes, and career goals. Faculty and staff from prospective and participating institutions can benefit from the panelists' discussion of aligning department initiatives for broadening participation with data about students' experiences.

I suspect that students learn more from our programming assignments than from our much worried-over lectures, with their slide transitions and attempts at live coding in lecture. A great assignment is deliberate about where the student hours go, concentrating the student's attention on material that is interesting and useful. The best assignments solve a problem that is topical and entertaining, providing motivation for the whole stack of work. Unfortunately, creating great programming assignments is both time consuming and error prone. The Nifty Assignments special session is all about promoting and sharing the ideas and ready-to-use materials of successful assignments.

The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) is an ACM-affiliated member organization of more than 26,000 educators and supporters of K-12 computer science. CSTA supports local communities of educators and partners through more than 70 local chapters, made up of educators, administrators, college faculty, and industry supporters, which meet regularly for networking and professional development. In addition, CSTA provides valuable resources to teachers and CS advocates, such as the newly revised K-12 CS Standards, research reports, a member listserv, a bimonthly newsletter, and recorded sessions from the annual conference. This session will provide a brief overview of CSTA, its chapters, and available resources for teachers. College faculty who are interested in connecting with local K-12 teachers will be encouraged to network and explore mutually beneficial partnerships. An open forum will follow for discussing CSTA's mission, possible initiatives, and benefits to K-12 and college educators. The major goals of this Birds-of-a-Feather session are:

The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) is a member organization of more than 21,000 educators and supporters of K-12 computer science. It was formed by and is affiliated with ACM, but serves as an independent non-profit with a mission to support K-12 CS teachers and promote computer science education. The past year has been a landmark one for CSTA, with the hiring of a new Executive Director, Dr. Mark R. Nelson, as well as a number of new initiatives. These initiatives include a new Website, expanded member benefits, new partnerships and advocacy programs, and a greater emphasis on professional development and research. This session will provide a brief overview of some of these initiatives, as well as introduce plans for the organization that are currently in development. The majority of the session will be an open forum in which attendees will be encouraged to voice their opinions and provide feedback to the Executive Director and members of the CSTA Board of Directors in attendance. Current CSTA members, along with any SICGSE attendees who have an interest in K-12 CS education, are encouraged to attend, learn about CSTA's efforts, and share experiences that can guide the future of CSTA and K-12 CS education.

Roughly once per decade, the ACM and IEEE-Computer Society form a joint task force to produce curricular guidelines for undergraduate computer science programs. The latest guidelines document, Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013), was released in December 2013. CS faculty at many institutions are interested in understanding CS2013, evaluating their curricula against it, and adopting some or all of the recommendations. This task is non-trivial at any institution, but it can be particularly challenging at small or liberal arts institutions. For instance, small schools with few faculty are limited in the number of courses they can offer, and many liberal arts colleges place limits on the number of courses that can be required for a major. How might a department with limited resources trade off covering the core while still providing electives to students? A meta-issue involves mapping CS2013 at all: Given the demands on a small department, are there ways to improve and update a curriculum without having to go through a complete CS2013 mapping? In this workshop we will: (1) give a brief overview of CS2013, (2) describe experiences mapping individual courses or an entire curriculum to CS2013, (4) split participants into working groups for course or curricular mapping based on starting points and goals, (4) re-group to share lessons learned from the mapping experience. Laptop Strongly Recommended.

One of the greatest challenges for K-12 computer science educators is finding the opportunities and resources to stay up-to-date with the field and its pedagogical practices. Teachers often lack CS colleagues at their school, which makes the lack of professional development opportunities even more significant. As part of its commitment to developing a strong community of computer science educators, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) supports the development of regional CSTA chapters. A CSTA chapter is a local branch of CSTA designed to facilitate discussion of local issues and to help connect teachers with professional development resources. This BOF will discuss existing professional development resources available to K-12 teachers, as well as providing a community building forum between high school teachers and college faculty. Attendees will be asked to share their professional development needs and desires, which will then guide the CSTA Professional Development committee in future efforts.

No abstract available.

For over 40 years, the ACM and IEEE-Computer Society have sponsored international curricular guidelines for undergraduate programs in computing. The rapid evolution and expansion of the computing field and the growing number of topics in computer science have made regular revision of curricular recommendations necessary. Thus, the Computing Curricula volumes are updated on an approximately 10-year cycle, with the aim of keeping curricula modern and relevant. The latest volume in the series, Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013), is due for release in the Fall of 2013. This panel seeks to inform the SIGCSE community about the final version of the report, provide insight on interpreting the CS2013 guidelines, and give guidance regarding how the guidelines may be implemented at different institutions.

As part of its commitment to developing a strong community of computer science educators, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) supports the development of regional CSTA chapters. A CSTA chapter is a local branch of CSTA designed to facilitate discussion of local issues, provision of member services at the local level, and to promote CSTA membership on the national level[1]. This BOF will provide a platform for the discussion of CSTA chapter formation and for the sharing of new resources to help chapters create dynamic and meaningful chapter activities.

Beginning over 40 years ago with the publication of Curriculum 68, the major professional societies in computing--ACM and IEEE-Computer Society--have sponsored various efforts to establish international curricular guidelines for undergraduate programs in computing. As the field has grown and diversified, so too have the recommendations for curricula. There are now guidelines for Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Information Technology, and Software Engineering in addition to Computer Science. These volumes are updated regularly with the aim of keeping computing curricula modern and relevant. In the Fall of 2010, work on the next volume in the series, Computer Science 2013 (CS2013), began. Considerable work on the new volume has already been completed and a first draft of the CS2013 report (known as the Strawman report) will be complete by the beginning of 2012. This panel seeks to update and engage the SIGCSE community in providing feedback on the Strawman report, which will be available shortly prior to the SIGCSE conference.

Assignments determine much of what students actually take away from a course. Sadly, creating successful assignments is difficult and error prone. With that in mind, the Nifty Assignments session is about promoting and sharing successful assignment ideas, and more importantly, making the assignment materials available for others to adopt.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

The 2004 school year marked significant changes in the Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science curriculum. Most visibly, Java replaced C++ as the exam-testable programming language. More fundamentally, however, the AP CS curriculum now places a greater emphasis on object-oriented design than in previous years. Students are expected to be able to implement interfaces, design and implement class hierarchies using inheritance, analyze the tradeoffs between alternative designs and their associated efficiencies, and make use of Java Collection classes where appropriate. This special session is intended to inform both high school and college teachers as to the extent of these changes and how they affected the development and grading of the 2004 AP CS exams. In addition, it will provide practical insights as to how the new curriculum can be taught in high schools, and how teachers can better prepare their students for the exams.The AP CS Development Committee's charge is not only to provide a comprehensive testing mechanism, but also to recommend a direction that high school teachers should take in preparing a foundation for more advanced student studies during college. This special session will bring together two college and two high school members of the AP CS Development Committee to share some of their insights into the AP program.AP teachers will learn valuable information to continue to support their shift to Java in the classroom and about the exam for which they are preparing their students. College teachers will learn more about the AP CS curriculum and test development process, which may aid them in similar course redesigns and in the placement of students with AP credit.Time will be provided to discuss participant's questions.

Educators are increasingly acknowledging that practical problems in computer science demand basic competencies in experimentation and data analysis. However, little effort has been made towards explicitly identifying those empirical concepts and skills needed by computer scientists, nor in developing methods of integrating those concepts and skills into CS curricula. In this paper, we identify a core list of empirical competencies and motivate them based on established courses outside of computer science, their potential use in standard CS courses, and their application to real-world problems. Sample assignments that facilitate the integration of these competencies into the CS curriculum are also discussed.

No abstract available.

We present several introductory computer science laboratory assignments designed to reinforce the use of the scientific method. These assignments require students to make predictions, write simulations, perform experiments, collect data and analyze the results. The assignments are specifically designed to place student predictions in conflict with the observed results, thus producing a disequilibration. As a result, students are motivated to critically examine their simulations, consider their assumptions, and repeat their experiments. These potential benefits of disequilibration are discussed and additional ways to apply disequilibration in computer science education are suggested.

Creating assignments is a difficult and time consuming part of teaching Computer Science. Nifty Assignments is a forum, operating at a very practical level, to promote the sharing of assignment ideas and assignment materials.Each presenter will introduce their assignment, give a quick demo, and describe its niche in the curriculum and its strengths and weaknesses. The presentations (and the descriptions below) merely introduce each assignment. For more detail, each assignment has its own web page with more detailed information and assignment materials such as handouts and data files to aid the adoption of the assignment. Information on participating in Nifty Assignments as well as all the assignment pages are available from our central page… http://cse.stanford.edu/nifty/

Empirical skills are playing an increasingly important role in the computing profession and our society. In addition to being problem-solvers and designers/engineers, computer scientists must also be capable experimenters in order to develop, test, and evaluate complex hardware and software systems. The widespread use of computers as tools for interdisciplinary research also demands a strong grounding in the scientific method.This panel is designed to promote discussion about innovative methods for integrating empirical skills within the traditional computer science curriculum. Each panelist will define a set of core empirical concepts and skills that they see as essential to computer scientists, with a brief rationale for each. In conjunction, they will describe classroom practices that serve to demonstrate the key concepts and/or develop skills they have identified. Sufficient time will be allocated for discussion and contributions from the audience.

Traditional approaches to CS0 have emphasized either breadth, through an overview of computer science, or depth, through intensive programming. This paper describes an alternative teaching method that strikes a balance between these two approaches through the use of JavaScript and the World Wide Web. By taking advantage of JavaScript's simplicity and natural Web-based interfaces, the CS0 course described here is able to maintain a strong emphasis on programming and problem-solving, integrate programming skills with Web technology, and still provide reasonable breadth on general computer science topics. This balance between depth and breadth makes the course attractive to both non-majors and majors alike, providing a broad perspective of the field as well as a foundation for continuing studies in computer science.

The Knob & Switch Computer is a computer architecture simulator designed to teach beginning students the basics of computer organization. It differs from existing simulators in two significant ways: (1) it incorporates cognitive hooks in the form of knobs and switches that encourage exploration and discovery on the part of the student; and (2) it can be presented one component at a time, starting with a simple interactive data path and building incrementally to a full-featured stored program machine. Both of these features make it possible to engage beginning students and effectively convey an understanding of how computers work. The Knob & Switch Computer simulator can also motivate the study of other computing topics such as data representation, assembly language programming, and RISC vs. CISC architectures. In addition to describing the Knob & Switch Computer, we discuss experiences using the simulator in breadth-based introductory courses both at Dickinson College and Creighton University.

Empirical skills are playing an increasingly important role in the computing profession and our society. But while traditional computer science curricula are effective in teaching software design skills, little attention has been paid to developing empirical investigative skills such as forming testable hypotheses, designing experiments, critiquing their validity, collecting data, explaining results, and drawing conclusions. In this paper, we describe an initiative at Dickinson College that integrates the development of empirical skills throughout the computer science curriculum. At the introductory level, students perform experiments, analyze the results, and discuss their conclusions. In subsequent courses, they develop their skills at designing, conducting and critiquing experiments through incrementally more open-ended assignments. By their senior year, they are capable of forming hypotheses, designing and conducting experiments, and presenting conclusions based on the results.

In [Wall96], Wallingford describes an approach to introductory courses that is based on programming patterns, i.e., algorithms or problem-solving approaches that can be applied to various applications. By focusing on patterns such as "Input-Process-Test" or "Process all items in a collection", students reason at a higher-level of abstraction when solving problems. In addition, code schema can be provided which apply to certain patterns, and these schema then serve as frameworks for program development. (See also [Rist89], [Coad92], and [GHJV95].)Closely related to the patterns approach is the use of themes in a programming course. Selecting a particular idea (such as self-reference [Astr94]), methodology (such as formal specifications [MH96]), or application domain (such as databases [AR95]) provides a framework for learning new techniques and concepts. Once a concept has been studied in one context, new applications which similarly utilize that concept can be understood more easily.This paper describes the use of a particular problem-solving pattern, binary reduction, as a recurring theme in the CS1 course. Other problem-solving approaches, such as divide-and-conquer or generate-and-test, could similarly be used. By introducing problem-solving patterns early in the course and then revisiting them in different contexts, students learn to look for common characteristics in problems, and to use an existing solution as a framework for solving related problems. Perhaps more importantly, understanding the behavior of one problem solution can simplify the analysis of other problem solutions based on the same pattern.

We have developed an application-based approach to introductory courses in computer science. This approach follows an apprenticeship model of learning, where students begin by reading, studying, and extending programs written by experienced and expert programmers. Applications play a central role since programming constructs are motivated and introduced in the context of applications, not the other way around as is the tradition in most texts and courses. Under our applied approach, (1) students are able to learn from interesting real-world examples, (2) the synthesis of different programming constructs is supported using incremental examples, and (3) good design is stressed vis code and concept reuse. In this paper, we provide several examples of our method as well as pointers to all the material we have developed which is freely available electronically. The philosophy underlying this method transcends a particular programming language, but we present our examples using C++ since that is the language used in the CS 1 and CS 2 courses at Duke. This method has been used with equal success using ISETL at Dickinson.