We present our experience with the design and implementation of BJC Sparks, a new introductory computer science curriculum for middle school piloted by ten teachers in the 2021-2022 academic year. Our curriculum is functional-first, using abstraction, functional decomposition, immutable data, and powerful higher-order functions such as map, keep, and combine. Based on a decade of experience teaching thousands of first-time programmers, we believe starting with functions teaches students the habit of solving problems functionally when possible, helping to avoid bugs in later programming experiences.

This poster introduces a new open-source tool for visualizing recursive algorithms. Many students struggle with understanding recursive algorithms and the way in which return values propagate from the base call back up to the original call. Teachers often show visualizations to help students improve their understanding, drawing a tower of calls for linear recursive algorithms or a much more complex tree of calls for tree recursive algorithms. We have created a web-based tool for automating the drawing of these call graphs for any recursive Python function, based solely on the function definition and function call. The call graphs show the arguments and return values for each recursive call, and can be stepped through interactively to show the order of calls from start to end. The graphs can also be embedded in web pages, since they're built with accessible web technologies. We have used this tool to help students understand recursion in university CS1 classes, and would like to keep improving it to be a useful tool for CS classes globally.

The poster shows early results implementing Faded Parsons prob- lems at a large public R1 university in a 1000+ enrollment CS1 course. Assignments traditionally involved open-ended code-writing questions that had little scaffolding, and many students spent long periods of independent time working on them. We attempted to improve scaffolding via Faded Parsons problems (FPPs)-a new variant to popular Parsons problems-where students fill in blanks in addition to rearranging lines of code into a valid program. We integrated these problems into assignments by adding an FPP with similar concepts for each code-writing question. By first learning the concepts within the constraints of an FPP, we hoped students would be able to identify and apply those concepts once faced with the code-writing questions. Our findings suggest that students took fewer attempts on code-writing problems than in a previous semes- ter, and survey results indicate that the majority of students found FPPs beneficial as an easier introduction to programming, and that they were good preparation for hand written exams

The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is a CS Principles (CSP) course created at UC Berkeley to reach high school and university nonmajors in computer science. It was chosen for the CSP pilot and endorsed by the College Board as an AP CSP curriculum and PD provider since the first AP CSP exam sitting in 2017. This past year, BJC developed a new course for middle school and early high school that teaches a functional approach to programming, emphasizing iteration and commands, and including exciting projects in graphics, data, and media. In this workshop, we will provide an overview of the BJC middle school and high school curriculum including course materials, teacher resources, and an introduction to Snap!, the chosen visual programming language of BJC. We will not only cover curriculum updates, Snap! updates, BJC for middle school, BJC in other languages, but also dive into labs with hands-on programming. Laptop is required.

Many instructors use slide formats like Keynote, Powerpoint, Google Docs, or PDF for their lectures. When the topic is programming, those slides formats are highly problematic: it is hard for the presenter to format code snippets with helpful syntax highlighting and hard for students to copy/paste code snippets and preserve indentation. The result is hard-to-read code and students that are less likely to try code for themselves. A better format is HTML slides. The slides are written with simple HTML tags, and a JavaScript library renders them as interactive slides. As a result, all of the code snippets have automatic syntax highlighting plus a one-click copy-to-clipboard button. For some programming languages, the code can even be executed on the slide itself. The slides still have the features of traditional formats: they can be converted to PDF for easy printing and note-taking, slide fragments can be animated in sequence (just by adding a single class name to a tag). But they have even more benefits, thanks to being web pages. HTML slides can be fully accessible for students with disabilities by following WCAG guidelines when writing the HTML, and they can be easily indexed by web search engines, making it easier for students across the world to learn from them. This lightning talk will take you on a tour of HTML slides and share a webpage with additional tips for how to get started with HTML slides in your own programming classes.

In his keynote at SIGCSE 2007, Grady Booch exhorted us to share the "passion, beauty, joy and awe" (PBJA) of computing. This led to a series of room-packed sessions at the following seven SIGCSE symposia to explore that idea from different angles. They have provided a forum for sharing:

Animating 3D faces to achieve compelling realism is a challenging task in the entertainment industry. Previously proposed face transfer approaches generally require a high-quality animated source face in order to transfer its motion to new 3D faces. In this work, we present a semi-automatic technique to directly animate popularized 3D blendshape face models by mapping facial motion capture data spaces to 3D blendshape face spaces. After sparse markers on the face of a human subject are captured by motion capture systems while a video camera is simultaneously used to record his/her front face, then we carefully select a few motion capture frames and accompanying video frames as reference mocap-video pairs. Users manually tune blendshape weights to perceptually match the animated blendshape face models with reference facial images (the reference mocap-video pairs) in order to create reference mocap-weight pairs. Finally, the Radial Basis Function (RBF) regression technique is used to map any new facial motion capture frame to blendshape weights based on the reference mocap-weight pairs. Our results demonstrate that this technique is efficient to animate blendshape face models, while offering its generality and flexiblity.