Spring 2025 marks 12 years since Snap! was first used with students and the Snap! Cloud was developed for sharing projects. Since then, nearly 1 million students and educators have worked on almost 10 million Snap! projects. This BOF brings together the growing community of Snap! users, teachers, and core developers at SIGCSE.

Late enrollment in computer science courses presents unique challenges that may impact student performance, engagement, and retention. This paper investigates the academic trajectories of late enrollees compared to their on-time peers, focusing on performance across different assessment types, the cumulative impact of coursework, and engagement with course resources such as office hours, discussion sections, and review sessions.

This work examines how first-generation college status, ethnicity, technology access, and prior programming experience shape student performance in an introductory computer science course. Using data collected across two semesters, we find that first-generation students (FGS) earned fewer A grades (72%) than their non–first-generation peers (NFGS, 82%). Disparities were most pronounced among Hispanic FGS, who also reported the lowest rates of consistent computer access. Ordinal logistic regression showed that first-generation status predicted lower grade outcomes even when controlling for prior experience. These findings highlight persistent inequities in CS0 and underscore the need for instructional and structural supports that address preparation gaps and differential access to computing resources.

Analogies and metaphors are ubiquitous in computing education, helping instructors break down complex or abstract ideas by connecting them to familiar experiences. This Birds of a Feather session invites educators from across the CS curriculum—from introductory through advanced courses—to share ''sticky'' analogies: explanations that clarify challenging concepts and remain memorable for students. Facilitators will begin with a small set of example analogies that illustrate how to articulate a learning goal, map each component of the analogy to the target concept, and identify any needed cultural or background knowledge. The floor will then open for attendees to contribute analogies that have either worked well for them or fallen flat, enabling collective reflection on what makes an analogy effective or ineffective. A shared document will be collaboratively built during the session so attendees can take away new analogies, refine existing ones, and continue contributing after the symposium.

Equitable grading practices, particularly the ''A's for All'' approach, aim to enhance student success for a diverse set of learners through formative assessments, eliminating curving, cumulative exams, lower-stakes assessments with retakes, and flexible extensions. Yet there is no common language to compare initiatives. To address this, we are developing a rubric to highlight which equitable grading elements are implemented in a course. This could benefit departments, who might showcase rubric scores to highlight faculty efforts; and students and advisors, who could make data-driven scheduling decisions. This poster presents our work-in-progress ten-point rubric, an example scoreboard application to four courses, and future work. Our hope is that this can eventually become a community owned-and-adopted lingua franca when discussing equitable grading practices.

University students, with their busy schedules and endless assignments, often struggle to remember due dates, upcoming tasks, and available course resources. Currently, courses use various educational platforms to navigate through coursework, causing confusion for students. We are developing AutoRemind, an opt-in notification tool that delivers personalized reminders for upcoming tasks and course resources via students' preferred communication platforms. AutoRemind is built to integrate with Learning Management Systems (LMS) to extract real-time data on student progress, assignment status, and available resources. This microservice, built for the GradeView platform, will serve as a centralized hub for students to gain access to all course deadlines and resources from a single source of truth, simplifying the process of tracking and completing tasks. This tool is not specific to computer science classes, so it potentially has very broad reach, hopefully leading to improved academic performance and increased course engagement. We aim to reduce administrative burdens on instructors and support mastery learning, enabling students to progress at their own pace while maintaining consistent academic performance.

Mastering algorithms and graph theory requires students to understand both the theoretical concepts and the practical mechanics. While most current assessments focus on the practical aspects, a deeper understanding of the theoretical concepts is often more crucial for truly grasping the material. Visualizations aim to help bridge this gap by allowing students to interact with data structures to trace traversals and outputs dynamically. We introduce an interactive tool through an online assessment platform that will enable students to click on different nodes and/or edges to dynamically change a graph model. There are numerous use cases, from introductory data structures and traversals such as depth-first and breadth-first search to more complicated algorithms such as tracing hypercube node processing. Although there are currently decorative components that display graphs and can be supplemented with submission elements, we hypothesize that by combining both features into one, students' learning will be significantly more effective. Through such a tool, we plan to assess students' performance in regard to (a) their score, (b) completion time, and (c) student satisfaction with the interactive assessments. We plan to analyze the types of errors students make depending on whether they are in the control or experimental groups. Further, we aim to assess how abstracting interactive assessment tools can be applied to introductory computer science courses to bridge the gap between proficiency and mastery learning.

As Computer Science undergraduate programs continue to increase in response to the still-unmet student demand, one growing trend is to engage current students as instructors of record, allowing for increases in course offerings and/or enrollments and giving these students extraordinary experiences in teaching. Despite these benefits, there are significant concerns that could be raised: do these student instructors have the maturity and training to handle the additional job requirements such as mentoring junior teaching staff, resolving difficult interpersonal situations, addressing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) issues, and garnering respect from students who might be a similar age? The goal of this panel is not to claim this solution is novel, but to share lessons learned, including the student instructor perspective, from faculty whose four institutions have been doing this successfully for years, each taking different approaches to engagement and pre-service professional development.

Delivery of affordable, secure, and scalable assessments is an essential component of large university courses, whether online or in-person. The transition to Computer-Based Testing (CBT) has a transformational effect on pedagogy. Modern CBT systems provide almost unlimited flexibility in the types of questions they can support for manual grading and autograding. In this BoF, faculty interested in learning about various components of CBT and how to implement it at their institution are invited to ask their questions and learn from others who have already done this. To facilitate these discussions, in this BOF we will break into four smaller groups to discuss CBT pedagogy, building and sharing question banks, technical or logistical considerations, and building buy-in from all levels of the institution.

This study explores the impact of a flexible retake policy on student performance in a university CS0 course that followed a mastery-learning approach. Students were given the opportunity to retake the exams by re-doing the questions they had initially answered incorrectly. Performance was analyzed by gender and race, revealing that women earned higher final grades and made more use of the retake policy compared to men. Underrepresented minority (URM) students had lower final grades and completed fewer retakes compared to students in the majority group. To evaluate the effectiveness of the retake policy, we developed the Exam Recovery Ratio (ERR) metric. Our findings showed that, while increased retake opportunities led to higher final grades overall, gains were not evenly distributed - higher performing students disproportionately benefited, widening the grade distribution. This highlights the need for a more detailed examination of equity-focused policies in educational settings.

This year's Snap! 9 release represents 10 years since Snap! 4.0 was initially released as a web application. Version 9 includes hundreds of new features, focused on providing students and teachers with new cloud tools, continued development of tools for working with data, and ''quality of life'' enhancements.

Data Science (DS) blends computer science, statistics, mathematics, and visualization. The absence of a nationwide DS curriculum in the US prompts educators to independently devise engaging DS curriculum. With support from the National Science Foundation and the United States Amateur Radio on the International Space Station, UC Berkeley teaching faculty developed a pilot curriculum, Student Mission Control (SMC), to engage middle and high school students with direct access to data and experiments aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to help develop skills of data inquiry, analysis, and exploration.

Gradeview is an innovative and ongoing project presenting a comprehensive dashboard designed to cater to the needs of both students and educators, offering a centralized platform for monitoring and managing course progress. This work in progress draws its data from a single Google Sheet ensuring that updates, such as new grades and categories, are seamlessly reflected across all student and administrator dashboards instantaneously. Gradeview leverages a plethora of other technologies that can drastically increase both student and educator productivity beyond the classroom setting. For instance, it introduces an interactive mastery learning Concept Map customized for each student. The organization structure of Gradeview promotes completion of work regardless of timeline so as to benefit student mental health and increase mastery of core concepts in the class. Our Director module enables the automated management of students' grades for those students working past the term deadline. In order to facilitate the implementation of these new dashboard modules, we developed the project to be an easy-to-use microservice architecture that can automatically track individual and overall student performance through course grading metrics.

Table transformations are a critical skill to master in order to fluently work with data. In introductory data science courses, however, students have found these transformations particularly challenging to learn. One complex transformation is the pivot transformation, which reorganizes a table based on aggregation and summarizing along selected columns and rows. Current assessments test student understanding in static scenarios. Thus, there is an opportunity to help students explicitly work through the steps and variables needed to express a pivot transformation in a randomizable manner. As such, we explore whether a dynamic digital assessment for the pivot transformation can effectively achieve mastery learning towards this skill. Our design is inspired by Parsons problems, in which answer components (pivot table output labels and values) can be composed into the output of a pivot transformation. A question can be derived from a small randomized dataset, and randomized Pandas code that operates upon the dataset and can be autograded. We plan to conduct a pilot study with data science students to investigate whether 1) using a programmable online platform to practice pivot tables helps improve performance on exams, and 2) randomization and instant feedback on the online platform contribute to improved student learning.

Computer-based testing (CBT) is becoming more common in CS Education spaces, and offers many advantages over paper-based modalities. For example, computerized assessments make it easier for students to learn from a wider range of questions in problem sets through problem randomization. Students can then work on problem after problem in a formative assessment mode of learning. While computer-based assessments help facilitate randomized prob- lem generation, solution feedback is typically delivered in static text or image formats, or perhaps a video may be provided. Typically these show or describe the instructor solving a generic problem, not this particular randomized problem.

Affordable, secure, and scalable assessment delivery is an essential component of large university courses, whether online or in-person. The switch to Computer-Based Testing (CBT) can have a surprising, and almost transformational effect on pedagogy. Modern CBT systems provide almost unlimited flexibility in the types of questions they can support, for both manual grading and autograding, and CBT has now been adopted at several universities and is under serious consideration at others. In this BoF, faculty interested in learning about CBT and how to implement it at their institution are invited to ask their questions. Faculty experienced with CBT are invited to share how CBT has changed their approach, pedagogy, and behavior and how to advocate for its adoption.

This panel is the evolution of seven years of Technology that Educators of Computing Hail (TECH) Birds of a Feather sessions, grew into popular panels, and a regular column in ACM Inroads. Leveraging our experiences of teaching during the pandemic, many of us have incorporated technology we were forced to rely on during our time online, making for an even better experience for our students. This forum will provide a chance for a seasoned middle school, high school, community college, and university educator to showcase the technologies they can't live without, what problems they solve, and how to use them.

The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) Sparks curriculum is an innovative computer science curriculum designed to introduce middle school and early high school students to the world of computer science through functional programming. Developed by the creators of BJC CS Principles (CSP), BJC Sparks presents a simplified yet engaging approach to programming, emphasizing the flow of information through functions. By focusing on functions rather than commands and iteration, BJC Sparks nurtures problem-solving skills and reduces bugs in future programming experiences.

In our introductory computer science course at a large public university, we embarked on a transformative journey inspired by Grading for Equity. Our goal: to accommodate differential learning, allowing students to attain a fixed level of mastery, albeit over a variable timeframe.

Spring 2023 marks 10 years since \snap was first used with students, and the Snap! Cloud was developed for sharing projects. Since then, nearly 700,000 students and educators have worked on more than 6 million Snap! projects. This BOF serves as an opportunity to meet with the large community of Snap! users that attend SIGCSE. The past three releases have focused on power ideas, such as native array-based data programming, building microworlds, and metaprogramming. We want to have a chance to share success stories, and then discuss: what's next?

Snap! version 8 introduces more than 700 documented fixes and enhancements book-ended by two major new features: smart script pics and metaprogramming. "Smart script pics" enable users to easily share images that embed the program inside the image file! All you need to do is simply drag-and-drop and images to share code. This simple feature makes projects far more collaborative by reducing the burden to share code.

Why do instructors have the grading policies they do (e.g., rigid assignment deadlines, curved grading, exams with no "clobber" where a high performance on a later exam overwrites an earlier poor score, etc.)? Chances are, it's because that was the way (a) they were graded as a student, (b) the department expected, or (c) the previous instructor did it before they took over.

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.

"A's for All (as time and interest allow)" is a position that says it is increasingly possible to aim for a world in which students can achieve any grade (level of mastery) that they are willing to work for, even if some students take longer than others or require more practice to get there. Achieving this goal would have profound effects on fairness, equity, and participation in computing, to say nothing of student learning outcomes. We describe what this goal would entail, why it is worth pursuing, what the mechanism and policy requirements are for making progress, and why now is a good time to do it. We give specific and actionable recommendations, many based on our own experience so far, that our colleagues who are excited about the approach can put into immediate practice, and address a number of concerns and objections that our proposal may raise. Importantly, our proposed approach is not all-or-nothing, but all-or-something: there are many things instructors can do within existing policy frameworks and course constraints to move their course experience in this direction.

Conference presentations usually focus on successful innovations: new ideas that yield significant improvements to current practice. Yet we often learn more from failure than from success. In this panel, we present five case studies of "good ideas" for improving CS education that didn't go as planned, related to offering additional help to students. Each contributor will describe their "good idea," the situation that resulted, and wider lessons for the CS community.

In recent years, a diverse body of research in computing education has discussed new pedagogies and curriculum changes to improve learning and students' experiences. Topics such as growth mindset, mastery learning, grading for equity, and specifications grading are important steps towards the Holy Grail: "A's for All" (as time and interest allow). In this new teaching approach, the "A" line does not move, but instead every student is given an opportunity to achieve proficiency and earn it, as long as they are willing to put in the time and effort it takes. In other words, students can all achieve the same learning outcomes at a different pace, instead of the traditional approach where students achieve different learning outcomes in a fixed amount of time. This workshop will provide educators and administrators with tools to implement the "A's for All" (as time and interest allow) approach in their courses and institutions. It will take attendees through elements of advocacy, hands-on randomized question generator design and implementation using a computer-based assessment system, best practices, and course policies to reduce friction.

Cybersecurity is a growing job field--and even for students who don't go on to pursue cybersecurity careers, it is crucial to have some level of security awareness. But until recently, the intrigue and opportunity of cybersecurity was usually not introduced until advanced undergraduate CS courses. However, the real world implications and applied nature of the topic lends itself well to catching the interest of a diverse group of students in CS at a younger age.

The last three years were a significant challenge for educational institutions, due to the loss of face-to-face instruction and exam proctoring. Many instructors turned to asynchronous, online exams as a replacement for standard pen-and-paper exams. It is no surprise that many tools aimed at delivering computer-based assessments have become popular and are centers of research and development. This poster discusses our attempt to build a post-exam cheating detection system for the PrairieLearn open-source platform that supports randomized question generators, to uncover irregularities in submissions. Our system compares all pairs of students using four rules: Times (did students take the exam synchronously?), Answers (did they have similar wrong answers?), Orders (did they answer the questions in the same order?), and Scores (did they achieve the same scores?). It adds one final individual rule, the Score-Time-Ratio, that measures how many "points per minute" a student has earned, to flag students who open the exam, copy in a perfect answer, and submit. We deliver a detailed report to the instructor, allowing them to sort their students based on these measures, providing a data-driven way for them to investigate.

The SIGCSE-MEMBERS mailing list of the ACM Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education is the main forum for educators worldwide to discuss computing education research, pedagogy, and curriculum. In early 2022 it was abuzz with several connected movements: growth mindset, proficiency (aka mastery) learning, grading for equity, and specifications grading. Each of these is an important step toward the Holy Grail: A's for All (as time and interest allow); the "A" line doesn't move, but every student should be given an opportunity to achieve proficiency and earn it, as long as they are willing to put in the time and effort it might take. The mantra is not "fixed time, variable learning", but "fixed learning, variable time". The goal of this full-day workshop is to provide educators and administrators with tools to achieve it in their courses and institutions.

The SIGCSE-MEMBERS mailing list of the ACM Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education is the main forum for educators worldwide to discuss computing education research, pedagogy, and curriculum. In early 2022 it was abuzz with several connected movements: growth mindset, proficiency (aka mastery) learning, grading for equity, and specifications grading. Each of these is an important step toward the Holy Grail: A's for All (as time and interest allow); the "A" line doesn't move, but every student should be given an opportunity to achieve proficiency and earn it, as long as they are willing to put in the time and effort it might take. The mantra is not "fixed time, variable learning", but "fixed learning, variable time".

Snap! version 7 introduces three big new features: microworlds, scenes, and extensions. Microworlds allow curriculum designers to hide blocks for novice users, allowing them to focus only on the blocks they need. This is similar to Parson's Problems, in which students rearrange commands to solve a challenge. The new version makes it easy for curriculum developers to design these microworlds; we think this can be truly transformative for younger learners. Scenes provide the ability for a single project to have different resources (sprites, sounds, costumes) that would normally have been cluttered in the same "namespace", but now can be nicely organized into different scenes. The last addition may be the most exciting - extensions allow the many Snap! forks now to be brought back in under the primary Snap! umbrella. To make that work, we have exposed low-level JavaScript functionality, and extensions can make use of those functions to adjust the look and feel of Snap! in many ways, provide different tabs or default blocks, and more. Finally, we would like to present some new ways that our teachers say they are using Hyperblocks (vector operations), introduced last year with Snap! 6. Overall, this new release represents more than 18 months of hard work by a dedicated team, and we would be delighted to share these new features with our SIGCSE family.

Conference presentations usually focus on successful innovations: new ideas that yield significant improvements to current practice. Yet we often learn more from failure than from success. In this panel, we present five case studies of "good ideas" for improving CS education (most related to the COVID-19 pandemic) that didn't go as planned. Each contributor will describe their "good idea", the situation that resulted, and wider lessons for the CS community.

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.

Cybersecurity is a growing job field -- and even for students who don't go on to pursue cybersecurity careers, it is crucial to have some level of security awareness. But until very recently, the intrigue and opportunity of cybersecurity was usually not introduced until advanced undergraduate CS courses. However, the real world implications and applied nature of the topic lends itself well to catching the interest of a diverse group of students in CS at a younger age.

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).

This panel is the evolution of a Technology that Educators of Computing Hail (TECH) Birds of a Feather session held at SIGCSE for seven years, grew into popular panels for many years, and served as a springboard for a regular column in ACM Inroads. It will provide a chance for seasoned middle school, high school, and university educators to showcase the technologies they can't live without, what problems they solve, and how to use them. This year, we asked our panelists to highlight any technology in particular that helped them survive (and possibly even thrive!) during their remote teaching.

Enrollments in computer science courses and majors are at or exceeding capacity at the college level. This context drives local innovations that may benefit individuals across the SIGCSE community. The panelists will share how, in the context of booming enrollments and COVID, they strive to protect faculty time, engage students in larger classes, take advantage of scale, improve student-TA interactions, motivate faculty to teach larger classes, and better monitor students in large classes. During the panel Q&A, attendees will be invited to share additional strategies live on Course.Care, which will then be disseminated through CSTeachingTips.org.

This paper provides an experience report for the asynchronous online assessments in two classes in Fall 2020: CS0 and CS3. The two courses shared many structural similarities; both were taught by the same instructor, with three exams delivered asynchronously using the same submission and question randomization software. They differed in proctoring rules, time allowances, student feedback, and lessons learned. In both classes, the first exam followed the same format, with students being given unlimited time over a 24-hour period to take the exam; later exams diverged due to different preferences among students in each class.

With many institutions forced online due to the pandemic, assessments became a challenge for many educators. Take-home exams provided the flexibility required for varied student needs (and time zones), but they were vulnerable to cheating. In response, many turned to tools that could present a different exam for every student. PrairieLearn is a feature-rich open-source package that allows educators to author randomized Question Generators; we have been using the tool extensively for the last two years, and it has a fast-growing educator user base. One of the first issues we noticed with the system was that the only way to quality assure (QA) a question was to click the new variant button, which would spin whatever internal random number generators were used again to produce a new question. Sometimes it was the same one you had just seen, and other times it would never seem to "hit'' on the variant you were looking to debug. This poster describes our team's work to solve this problem through the design of an API that would allow a question to declare how many total variants it had, and be asked to render variant i. The user interface could then be extended to list what variant the QA team was viewing out of the total (e.g., 7/50), and a next, previous and go to a particular variant buttons would allow for the team to easily QA all variants.

Interest in computer-based assessment has increased in recent years, most certainly due to a shift to online learning due to the COVID pandemic. Instructors are creating questiongenerators for Computer Science classes on PrairieLearn (PL), an open-source platform developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign PrairieLearn. The software generates differentvariants of each question to students through randomization. The challenge up to now has been that automatically graded coding problems in RISC-V or Snap!, some of the significant languages used in undergraduate Computer Science courses at our university, weren't possible to do within the software. Thequestion could be displayed, but then the student would have to load their favorite integrated development environment (IDE), code it up, and thenreturn to PL to upload their solution. This poster discusses our approach to embedding interactive development environments for Venus (RISC-V) and Snap! directly into PrairieLearn, so students never have to leave the browser tab!

This workshop will be a tutorial on effective media production for computer science courses. We'll spend time breaking down the ways that you can use media in your courses, both live and pre-recorded. Good media production relies heavily on both well-planned curriculum and pre-production. As part of this, we'll focus on our work building courses around short 5-10 minute videos, which have been shown to encourage engagement from students. We'll discuss designing your content and process for efficient turn around, so that you can successfully build a course 'just in time'.

Microworlds are sandboxed learning environments, often used for a particular educational purpose. We introduce the Big Pixel Microworld, to allow young students to explore and visualize functions that operate on the discrete 'pixels' of the XY coordinate axes. They can change the size of a 'pixel' by 3x (a single 1x1 big 'pixel', or 3x3, 9x9, 27x27 grids etc. all the way down to 729x729, in which one displayed 'pixel' is one screen pixel).

In early July we released Snap! version 6, with many cool new features, including a ground-up rewrite to be faster and reduce memory use by up to 20x. However, the most powerful 'big idea' is the introduction of an APL-style programming paradigm, which we call 'Hyperblocks'. This augments all existing reporter-block scalar inputs to accept N-dimensional lists of any shape as arguments as well, instead of being considered a domain error. These 'dimension-generic' blocks allow us to teach complex concepts without the need for loops or our beloved map block. For example, the domain of the multiply block had previously only been numbers, and if we had wanted to return a new list in which all of the elements were multiplied by 10, we would have had to use map(10*( ))over(data). Now we can simply say 10*data! In Snap! 6, Hyperblocks enable fast vectorized computations, making it much more efficient to do data analysis and media computation projects. There's nothing that beats a live demonstration of all these wonderful features, and we have two veteran power users to take it through its paces.

Abstract Strategy Games are games of no chance with complete information - all players (usually two) know all there is about the current position; nothing is hidden. Examples of popular games are Tic-Tac-Toe, Chess, Checkers, Connect-4, Reversi, Mancala, Nim, Dots-and-Boxes, and Go; there are thousands more. In addition to the cultural history and remarkably beautiful mathematics locked within the strategies and game trees, we have found they form a wonderfully fertile, rich, and engaging source of activities around which to teach fundamentals of computer science. This panel will explore the ways in which we have used these games with our students, through interactive tutorials and reflection that will each surface a particular CS concept. After sharing best practices, we will invite the audience to contribute their own experiences.

This panel is an outgrowth of a Technology that Educators of Computing Hail (TECH) Birds of a Feather session held at SIGCSE for seven years, which has grown into popular panels for four years, and served as a springboard for a regular column in ACM Inroads. It will provide a chance for seasoned high school and university educators to show the technologies that they can't live without, what problems they solve, and how to use them.

The CSforALL movement to bring computational thinking to K-12 has been a boon for practitioners and language developers. This panel features three educators passionate about a particular lan- guage that has been successful with K-12 audiences. Each will demonstrate their language, describe what makes it unique, and share some of the fun and engaging projects students have created.

The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is a CS Principles (CSP) course created at UC Berkeley to reach high school and university non-majors 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. In this workshop, we will provide an overview of the BJC 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. Some of our experienced BJC Lead Teachers will provide support and answer questions based on personal classroom experience. This workshop is intended to be an introduction and update to the Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum (bjc.edc.org) and community. This is not intended to be an in-depth experience, but an overview. Note: It is recommended to use least a Chromebook during the workshop in order to achieve the learning outcomes. Also, having Multiple/dual monitors will make for a better experience.

As Computer Science undergraduate programs continue to increase in response to the still-unmet student demand, one growing trend is to engage current students as instructors of record, allowing for increases in course offerings and/or enrollments and giving these students extraordinary experiences in teaching. More and more programs are attempting to create sustainable and beneficial positions for student instructors as a way to handle current teaching needs as well as develop the next wave of teaching-track faculty. This BOF will enable a discussion of the why and how programs choose to engage students as instructors, including challenges, best practices, lessons learned, and tips for starting such a program. The discussion leaders can offer perspectives from differing approaches including student population (undergraduate vs. graduate), teaching context (summer vs. non-summer term, solo vs. shared teaching models), and support structures (administrative, mentorship, training) and will have former student teachers from their institutions participate in the small group discussions to reflect upon their experiences.

With many Universities and Institutions moving toward online learning during the pandemic, content delivery and assessment become a new challenge for many educators. It comes as no surprise that many tools aimed at delivering computer-based assessments have become popular and are fields of active research. Members of the ACE Lab at UC Berkeley are creating question generators for computer science classes on a platform called PrairieLearn, to generate different randomized variants of questions. This poster discusses our team's approach to question variant categorization, which we believe would be useful metadata for other educators reusing our questions or generating their own.

The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is a CS Principles course developed at UC Berkeley for high school juniors through university non-majors. Together, UC Berkeley, the Education Development Center, and NC State have brought BJC to 700+ teachers nationwide. Since 2011, NC State has developed regional partnerships and a train-the-trainer model to offer nationwide PD to 600+ high school teachers. Our guiding philosophy is to meet students where they are, but not leave them there. BJC covers the big ideas and computational thinking practices in the AP CSP curriculum framework using Snap!, an easy-to-learn blocks-based programming language, and powerful computing ideas like recursion, higher-order functions, and computability. Through BJC, students create beautiful images, and realize that code itself can be beautiful. Having fun is an explicit course goal. BJC takes a "lab-centric" approach, and most learning occurs through guided programming labs where students explore and play. In this workshop, we will provide an overview of BJC, share experiences as instructors at university and high school levels, and share details of summer PD opportunities. Laptop needed.

Many of us use fractals (e.g., C-Curve) and the Fibonacci sequence to teach recursion to our students. We show that the naïve recursive implementations of them have exponential running time. However, while we all explain that the Fibonacci sequence can be computed in linear time, how many of us show that completely self-similar fractals can also be created in linear time?

In early June, we released Snap! version 5, with more new features than in any previous release. We now have a community website where users can share and publish projects so others can find and remix them, and where they can ask questions and discuss the beauty and joy of computing. We can now embed Snap! projects in other web pages. We've also enhanced the programming language, making it easier to discover and to use powerful blocks for analyzing data and transforming media. Did you know you can now use the video motion from the camera as an input device? How about painting by whistling? There's nothing that beats a live demonstration of all these wonderful features, and we have two veteran power users to take it through its paces.

Five institutions awarded grants by the Hopper-Dean foundation to develop interventions that would advance diversity in computer science will present their initiatives and results. This panel will allow them to share what was successful, what was challenging or did not work, and how the lessons they learned are applicable to all institutions, small and large.

Cybersecurity is vital to a technology-driven society. Daily headlines about data breaches and ransomware attacks demonstrate that we cannot ignore the security risks inherent to our highly networked lives. Cybersecurity is a growing job field -- and even for students who don't go on to pursue cybersecurity careers, it is crucial to have some level of security awareness. But until very recently, the intrigue and opportunity of cybersecurity was usually not introduced until advanced undergraduate CS courses. However, the real world implications and applied nature of the topic lends itself well to catching the interest of a diverse group of students in CS at a younger age. The Teaching Security lessons (at teachingsecurity.org) introduce the broad idea of cybersecurity through threat modeling and the human-centered nature of authentication. They were prepared by subject-matter experts with research backgrounds in the technical workings and social implications of cybersecurity. Our lessons were designed to meet the cybersecurity learning objectives in the AP Computer Science Principles framework, but they are appropriate for any high school computer science class or program. This will be an interactive workshop for CS educators at all levels; no previous cybersecurity experience required. (Laptops also optional.) Participants will learn how to begin developing the "security mindset" by teaching students a simplified version of threat modeling (mostly via "unplugged" activities). We will also preview lessons on authentication and social engineering. The workshop will also provide opportunities for attendees who teach cybersecurity to share their own strategies.

Conference presentations usually focus on successful innovations: new ideas that yield significant improvements to current practice. Yet educators know that we often learn more from failure than from success. In this panel, we present four case studies of "good ideas" for improving CS education that resulted in failures. Each contributor will describe their "good idea", the failure that resulted, and wider lessons for the CS community.

It's no surprise that students in introductory computer science courses face numerous challenges: for many, it's their first time ever programming, and computer science courses tend to be difficult and time-consuming. Parsons problems, problems where students piece together given code to write programs, solve some of these student issues: they have been shown to be more time efficient, yet just as effective for learning as traditional programming problems. However, in introductory computer science courses, students come in with varying skill sets and backgrounds. In response, some researchers have explored the space of adaptive Parsons problems, problems that provide varying levels of scaffolding based on students' abilities, continuing to adapt in difficulty based on students' progress. This paper will extend the work done on adaptive Parsons problems in two ways: by applying it to block-based programming languages, which are often used in introductory computer science courses, and by assessing its impacts on student confidence and attitudes towards the material. This study will use both intra-problem adaptive Parsons problems, where the difficulty of the existing question can be adjusted, and inter-problem adaptive Parsons problems, where the difficulty changes across problems based on student progress.

In the past several years, there has been an increase in web-based compilers that allow students to learn how to code using a browser. Many Universities use online code editors for their large Computer Science (CS) courses. For example, the CS200 course at UC Berkeley uses Jupyter Notebooks to teach Python for data science to 800+ students. All the students in the course must write and submit their code assignments in the web-browser. These online code editors for large CS courses presents several benefits. One benefit is that it becomes easier to monitor the steps that a student takes to solve a coding problem since keystrokes can be tracked using Javascript. Another benefit is that the code written by students can be stored in one central database, creating less barriers for code analysis. The CodeKey project aims to take advantage of analyzing code patterns of students in a CS course in order to find key insights. CodeKey aims to find these insights by monitoring the interactions (i.e. clicks and keystrokes) of students as each student attempts to solve a coding problem. The goal is to study the code patterns of students in a CS course in order to understand similarities and differences between students who perform well on a problem and students who do not. We also aim to study how revealing these coding patterns to a student can increase his understanding of how to solve a difficult coding problem by showing common mistakes, and by showing simple steps that lead to the correct solution.

About twice a year, typically at the start of a new semester, the SIGCSE community listserv comes alive with a discussion of tools for grading. This panel formed from a challenge to submit novel perspectives on grading. Of the dozen replies posted within 48 hours, the assembled panelists provide differing perspectives on the same point: let's return to building tools and methodologies for teaching rather than focusing on grading

With approximately 37,000 students entering college with an Advanced Placement CS Principles credit, students, parents, and teachers are wondering how that AP credit "counts" in college. In this panel, we will share perspectives from the College Board and higher education institutions of various pathways from CS Principles to a major in CS. While over 500 institutions have indicated they have credit and placement policies for CSP, they may vary quite a bit. (Credit gives students units of credit on their college record while placement means the AP credit can meet a particular course requirement.) For example, some institutions offer credit only, while others allow the course to count as part of a general education program, as a major elective, or even require CSP in the major. Panelists will share institutional context and reasoning behind their policies. Audience members will have a better understanding of the breadth of credit and placement options and considerations for their own institution.

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. Six exceptional educators will present their favorite piece of innovative lecture content just as they would their students. The moderator, Colleen Lewis, will describe the central pedagogical move within the innovation and how this connects to education research. The goal of the session is to inspire SIGCSE attendees by highlighting innovative instruction by exceptional educators. The specific content of the innovative instruction may be applicable for some attendees, and the discussion of the underlying pedagogical move within each innovation can be applied across the attendees' teaching.

While text based languages have been (relatively) easy to grade automatically, visual programming languages have been largely left out of the equation. However, as the demand for introductory CS courses has recently grown, so too has the interest in CS courses that use visual programming languages, and thus the need for a scalable solution to providing student feedback. In this poster we present a system design for an autograder for Snap!, a visual programming language designed at UC Berkeley, inspired by Scratch. Creativity and open-ended responses are an important part of many CS0 courses, such as the Beauty and Joy of Computing, our autograder includes tools that allow instructors to build robust feedback mechanisms that handle a wide variety of student submissions. We also present our initial work to integrate this system into edX for a series of MOOCs as well as a prototype of integrating this tool into a traditional LMS on campus.

Increasing need for computing expertise in our everyday lives and in the workforce, paired with declining enrollments in computing by women and underrepresented minorities have made it critical to provide students with experiences in computing before college. CS10K is a national effort to engage 10,000 high school teachers in teaching computer science across the United States. With CS10K projects working on this goal since 2012 having prepared less than 1000 teachers for teaching computer science in high school, there is a need to scale professional development opportunities to local communities. College and university computing faculty have the unique preparation and call for community engagement that make it a win-win to support local high school teachers in learning to teach computer science. We will use the STARS model of building university-based communities that broaden participation in computing, adapted to the context of supporting K12 teachers to become change agents and educators prepared to teach computer science. In this workshop, participants will learn how to implement scalable team-based professional development for K12 teachers new to teaching computer science. We will provide resources to recruit, plan, and support small groups of new teachers to teach the new CS Principles course that will become an Advanced Placement course in 2016-2017. Laptops for attendees are optional.

A basic understanding of online privacy is essential to being an informed digital citizen, and therefore basic privacy education is becoming ever more necessary. Recently released high school and college computer science curricula acknowledge the significantly increased importance of fundamental knowledge about privacy, but do not yet provide concrete content in the area. To address this need, over the past two years, we have developed the Teaching Privacy Project (TPP) curriculum, http://teachingprivacy.org, which educates the general public about online privacy issues. We performed a pilot of our curriculum in a university course for non-CS majors and found that it was effective: weeks after last being exposed, students' privacy attitudes had shifted. In this paper, we describe our curriculum, our evaluation of it in the classroom, and our vision for future privacy education.

The pace of technology for use in computing education is staggering. In the last few years, the following technologies have completely transformed our teaching: Piazza, GradeScope, Google Docs, YouTube, Doodle and whenisgood.net, Skype and Google Hangout, and Khan Academy among others. Hardware has also played a part -- we love our Zoom digital voice recorder (for recording CD-quality lecture audio), Blue Yeti USB mike (for audio/videoconferences), and iClickers (for engaging students in class).

The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is a CS Principles (CSP) course developed at UC Berkeley, intended for high school juniors through university non-majors. It was twice chosen as a CSP pilot, and both the College Board and code.org have endorsed it. Since 2011, we have offered professional development to over 240 high school teachers. Our guiding philosophy is to meet students where they are, but not to leave them there. It covers the big ideas and computational thinking practices required in the AP CSP curriculum framework using an easy-to-learn blocks-based programming language called Snap! (based on Scratch), and powerful computer science ideas like recursion, higher-order functions and computability. Through the course, students learn to create beautiful images, and realize that code itself can be beautiful. Having fun is an explicit course goal. We take a "lab-centric" approach, and much of the learning occurs through guided programming labs that ask students to explore and play. In this workshop, we will provide an overview of BJC, share our experiences as instructors of the course at the university and high school level, provide a glimpse into a typical week of the course, and share details of potential crowd-funded summer professional development opportunities. This is a hands-on workshop. Laptops are required, and all "handouts" will be digital.

"Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it." - Proverb In 2005, computing education was experiencing a crisis. Enrollments had "fallen to such an extent that some academic computing programs were facing significant reductions in staffing levels or even elimination". The community responded, with panels to investigate and highlight ways to infuse "passion, beauty, joy and awe" into the introductory experiences, the CS10K project to bring computing to 10,000 teachers and 100,000 students, and better messaging of career opportunities, to name a few of the initiatives to bring students back into our seats.

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:

One man's "magic" is another man's engineering. -- Robert A. Heinlein

There are always some students who succeed and some students who don't. Our four panelists are committed to the success of all students, but have different explanations for students' lack of success. This panel discussion will highlight both their shared beliefs and disagreements between veteran CS educators Stuart Reges and Dan Garcia, CS education researcher Colleen Lewis, and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science Nathan Ensmenger. We hope this lively discussion will bring together divergent and complementary positions and expertise, as well as invite significant audience participation.

As classes grow beyond hundreds or even a thousand students, instructors must come to grapple with handling course logistics at scale. Otherwise mundane tasks can no longer be handled in an ad hoc way, and standard course design challenges become more acute. Just to name a few issues, the instructor might have to contend with: Providing timely effective feedback for students, exam scheduling, recruiting and managing a teaching staff that consists of dozens of people, ensuring consistency of grading, identifying and providing interventions for struggling students, providing a consistent policy for makeup work, and creating diverse course content (e.g. lab, HW, discussion section) that allows for an efficient path to mastery for each student regardless of diverse backgrounds and ability. If you have good ideas for handling these issues you'd like to share, or just want to learn what others are doing, come join us! Discussion will ideally include staffing techniques, technologies (including automated assessments), and ways of developing course content. A master list of such tips will be compiled and provided to the SIGCSE community.

Computer Science Principles (CSP) will become an Advanced Placement course during the 2016-17 school year, and there is an immediate need to train new teachers to be leaders in computing classrooms. From 2012-2015, the Beauty and Joy of Computing team offered professional development (PD) to 133 teachers, resulting in 89 BJC CSP courses taught in high schools. Our data show that the PD improved teachers' confidence in our four core content categories and met its primary goal of training teachers in equitable, inquiry-based instruction. In this paper, we present the evolution of the BJC PD, its challenges and lessons that we learned while continually adapting to teachers' needs and contexts.

Many computer science departments have chosen to hire faculty to teach in a teaching-track position that parallels the standard tenure-track position. These teaching-track positions include the possibility for promotion, longer-term contracts and greater pay as demonstrated by excellence in teaching, educational material development, and service. Since this type of position is relatively new in CS departments, the expectations and responsibilities for such faculty varies from one university to another, but they certainly differ from the traditional tenure-track positions. This birds-of-a-feather is designed to gather educators who are currently in such a position to share their experiences as members of the faculty of their departments and schools, and to provide opportunities for schools considering such positions to gather information. In past sessions, we have laid the groundwork for keeping this community together through online discussions and consolidating information about teaching-track positions at various universities together into an online database.

CS10, is UC Berkeley's CS0 course. Each semester we have between 40% and 50% of our students continue on to CS61A, our CS1 course. Meanwhile an average of 25% more students express interest in continuing learning computer science through other means. CS10 is taught in a visual language called Snap! and CS61A in Python. This poster explores some of the trends we have seen between CS10 and CS61A enrollment, and our new "Besides Blocks" curriculum which helps transition students from a visual to text based language. Besides Block is approximately one fourth of the CS10 curriculum which introduces Python in the context of the Turtle Graphics system, and a tool called Codification which is a way of translating Snap! blocks to Python.

Although frequent stories in the popular media have raised awareness about online privacy, most young people do not have a very good handle on what the specific issues are, nor the practical steps they can take to manage them. Teachers recognize that all their students' from future engineers to those totally bored by science need a realistic understanding of how online privacy works, so they can protect themselves online. In fact, the latest CS curricular recommendations include privacy but there is no comprehensive set of field-tested teaching materials. To address this, we are developing TROPE (Teachers' Resources for Online Privacy Education), a set of classroom-ready teaching materials (teachingprivacy.org). TROPE will provide educators with lesson modules, interactive demonstrations, and a teachers' guide, so they can readily integrate privacy into high school and college classes. Our goal for this workshop is twofold. First, we will introduce educators to TROPE and provide guidance on how they can cover privacy-related topics in their classrooms without being subject-matter experts. Second, we will solicit feedback and on-the-ground stories; by gaining a better understanding of specific problems faced by educators and students, we can increase TROPE's utility to teachers. We will provide teachers with up-to-date technical information about online privacy, including relevant highlights from our research; hands-on activities illustrating principles of online privacy; and an overview of the materials we are creating for TROPE. This will be an interactive workshop, driven by participants' questions, experiences, and interests. For CS educators at all levels; laptop or tablet recommended.

No abstract available.

The pace of technology for use in computing education is staggering. In the last five years, the following technologies have completely transformed our teaching: Piazza, Google Docs, PandaGrader (now GradeScope), YouTube, Doodle, Skype, Google Hangout, Khan Academy, etc. Hardware has also played a part; we love our Zoom H2 digital voice recorder (for CD-quality lecture audio), Blue Yeti USB mike (for audio / videoconferences), and iClickers (for engaging students in class).

The recent successes of Computer Science Education Week and code.org's Hour of Code have meant that more K-12 students than ever are being given an authentic, engaging and eye-opening exposure to the wonders of computer science. There are resources aplenty to help high school and college faculty with outreach. These range from easy-to-learn, open-ended programming environments (Scratch, Alice, Snap!), to online coding challenges (code.org, Lite-bot), to non-computer activities with live performances (CS Unplugged, cs4fn), to having the entire outreach experience delivered "in a box", thanks to NCWIT.

As classes grow beyond hundreds or even a thousand students, instructors must come to grapple with handling course logistics at scale. Otherwise mundane tasks can no longer be handled in an ad hoc way, and standard course design challenges become more acute. Just to name a few issues, the instructor might have to contend with: Exam scheduling, recruiting and managing a teaching staff that consists of dozens of people, ensuring consistency of grading, identifying and providing interventions for struggling students, providing a consistent policy for makeup work, and creating diverse course content (e.g. lab, HW, discussion section) that allows for an efficient path to mastery for each student regardless of diverse backgrounds and ability. If you have good ideas for handling these issues you'd like to share, or just want to learn what others are doing, come join us! Discussion will ideally include staffing techniques, technologies (including automated assessments), and ways of developing course content.

Now finding footing in objective research methodology, MOOCs have made significant strides toward developing into mature platforms for not only offering educational materials but also performing exploratory analysis of educational methods. Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) has been repeatedly shown to be successful at providing an accurate model of student knowledge in more traditional classroom settings, and recent research has explored the application of BKT to MOOCs with promising results. Using data from several MOOCs run by Stanford university, we propose to extend earlier research into the application of BKT to MOOCS by developing a framework within which the use of course resources and student performance can be leveraged both to increase the predictive accuracy of BKT modeling and to provide an evaluative metric for the utility of those resources. We hope that such a framework can contribute not only to MOOC courses, but traditional classrooms as well.

Many computer science departments have chosen to hire faculty to teach in a teaching-track position that parallels the standard tenure-track position. These teaching-track positions include the possibility for promotion, longer-term contracts and greater pay as demonstrated by excellence in teaching, educational material development, and service. Since this type of position is relatively new in CS departments, the expectations and responsibilities for such faculty varies from one university to another, but they certainly differ from the traditional tenure-track positions. This birds-of-a-feather is designed to gather educators who are currently in such a position to share their experiences as members of the faculty of their departments and schools, and to provide opportunities for schools considering such positions to gather information. In past sessions, we have laid the groundwork for keeping this community together through online discussions and consolidating information about teaching-track positions at various universities together into an online database.

Pair programming, a form of collaborative learning where two programmers work on the same computer, enhances learning in novice programmers and improves code quality in experienced programmers. Remote pair programming (RPP) brings the pedagogical technique of pair programming to the distributed online environment of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). edX's CS169 Software as a Service MOOC successfully uses a Google+ community for students to generate their own RPP events or join events created by their peers. This paper examines survey results summarizing the RPP experiences and RPP technologies of student pairings in the Fall 2013 offering of CS169. In the future, the aim is to generalize RPP methodology through analyzing RPP sessions, expand applications of RPP to other MOOCs and traditional classrooms, and compare its effectiveness to in-person pair programming.

The Online Course Tool for Adaptive Learning (OCTAL) is an adaptive exercise system that customizes the progression of question topics to each student. By creating a concept dependency graph of topics in a course and modeling a student's knowledge state, the tool presents questions that test knowledge within a student's zone of proximal development. We intend OCTAL to be a formative assessment tool that is not tied to any specific course by providing language-agnostic questions on computer science concepts. While the tool will be generalizable for many courses, our first prototype includes a concept map and question set for UC Berkeley's introductory computer science course, CS10: The Beauty and Joy of Computing. Using the tool, we will launch an experiment in the spring to investigate metacognitive improvements in the identification of knowledge gaps by presenting online course material in a nonlinear fashion.

UC Berkeley's CS10 course captures high-definition lectures featuring a unique overlay of the professor over slides. This paper is a brief overview of the demo we presented at [email protected] 2014. We'll also go into other forms of video we incorporate into the class. Finally, we'll present tips and tricks we've learned in both the pre-production and production stages of the video process.

The Online Course Tool for Adaptive Learning (OCTAL) is an adaptive exercise system that customizes the progression of question topics to each student. By creating a concept dependency graph of topics in a course and modeling a student's knowledge state, the tool will present questions that test knowledge within a student's zone of proximal development. We intend OCTAL to be a formative assessment tool that is not tied to any specific course by providing language-agnostic questions on computer science concepts. While the tool will be generalizable for many courses, our first prototype will include a concept map and question set from an introductory CS1 course, UC Berkeley's CS10: The Beauty and Joy of Computing. Using the tool, we are investigating metacognitive improvements in the identification of knowledge gaps by presenting online course material in a nonlinear fashion.

Our grand challenge is to scale high-quality computer science curriculum and instruction to reach all high school students. CS10K -- an NSF and ACM-sponsored project -- is working to do just that by supporting curriculum development, computer education research and professional development through the Computing Education for the 21st Century (CE21) program at NSF. Professional Development (PD) is a key piece of the project, as we need to train 10,000 teachers to teach rigorous computing courses in 10,000 high schools by 2016 -- the school year that a new Advanced Placement Course will be rolled out. This panel will provide an overview of the PD landscape and then each panelist will discuss the unique aspects of their PD project for high school teachers.

The pace of technology for use in computing education is staggering. In the last five years, the following tools / websites have completely transformed our teaching: Piazza, Google Docs, PandaGrader, YouTube, Doodle and whenisgood.net, Skype and Google Hangout, and Khan Academy among others. Hardware has also played a part -- we love our Zoom H2 digital voice recorder (for recording CD-quality lecture audio), Blue Yeti USB mike (for audio/videoconferences), and iClickers (for engaging students in class). Do you wish you could easily share your favorites? Want to find out what the others know that you don't? Have a tool you've built and want to get some users' Come to this BOF! We'll also show the TECH website we've built that attempts to collect all of these tools in one place.

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 six SIGCSE symposia to explore that idea from different angles. They have provided a forum for sharing: What we've done: Highlighting successful PBJA initiatives the presenters have undertaken or seen and wish to trumpet. What we should do (curriculum): Pointing out where our curriculum is lacking in PBJA, and how to fix it. How we should do it (pedagogy): Sharing how a change in attitude / focus / etc. can make strides to improving PBJA.

"Seldom was any knowledge given to keep, but to impart; the grace of this rich jewel is lost in concealment." -- Bishop Hall

The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is an introductory computer science curriculum developed at UC Berkeley (and adapted at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte), intended for high school juniors through university non-majors. It was used in two of the five initial pilot programs for the AP CS Principles course being developed by the College Board and the National Science Foundation. Our overall goal is to support the CS10K project by preparing instructors to teach the AP CS Principles course through the BJC curriculum. In this workshop, we will share our experiences as instructors of the course at the university and high school level, provide a glimpse into a typical week of the course, and share details of NSF-funded summer professional development opportunities.

This workshop is for high school and college teachers of general-interest ("CS 0") computer science courses, especially the AP CS: Principles course. SNAP! (Build Your Own Blocks) is a free, browser-based, graphical, drag-and-drop language inspired by Scratch. The beauty of the Scratch programming environment, designed for 8-14 year olds, is that it makes abstract concepts more concrete and understandable to a broader audience. SNAP! extends Scratch to support older learners (14-20) with built-in named procedures (thus recursion), procedures as data (thus higher order functions), structured lists, and sprites as first class objects with inheritance.

Pair programming, a form of collaborative learning where two programmers work on the same computer, enhances learning in novice programmers and improves code quality in experienced programmers. Remote pair programming (RPP) brings the pedagogical technique of pair programming to the distributed online environment of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). UC BerkeleyX's CS169 Software as a Service MOOC successfully uses a Google+ community for students to generate their own RPP events or join events created by their peers. We will examine survey results summarizing the RPP experiences and RPP technologies of student pairings in the Fall 2013 offering of CS169, as well as analyze RPP sessions. In the future, the aim is to generalize RPP methodology, expand its applications to other MOOCs and traditional classrooms, and compare its effectiveness to in-person pair programming.

Coding style is important to teach to beginning programmers, so that bad habits don't become permanent. This is often done manually at the University level because automated Python static analyzers cannot accurately grade based on a given rubric. However, even manual analysis of coding style encounters problems, as we have seen quite a bit of inconsistency among our graders. We introduce ACCE--Automated Coding Composition Evaluator--a module that automates grading for the composition of programs. ACCE, given certain constraints, assesses the composition of a program through static analysis, feature extraction, supervised learning and clustering (unsupervised learning), automating the subjective process of grading based on style and identifying common mistakes. Further, we create visual representations of the clusters to allow readers and students understand where a submission falls, and the overall trends. We have applied this tool to CS61A--a CS1 level course at UC, Berkeley experiencing rapid growth in student enrollment--in an attempt to help expedite the involved process as well as reduce human grader inconsistencies.

Many computer science departments have chosen to hire faculty to teach in a teaching-track position that parallels the standard tenure-track position. These teaching-track positions include the possibility for promotion, longer-term contracts and greater pay as demonstrated by excellence in teaching, educational material development, and service. Since this type of position is relatively new in CS departments, the expectations and responsibilities for such faculty varies from one university to another, but they certainly differ from the traditional tenure-track positions. This birds-of-a-feather is designed to gather educators who are currently in such a position to share their experiences as members of the faculty of their departments and schools, and to provide opportunities for schools considering such positions to gather information. In past sessions, we have laid the groundwork for keeping this community together through online discussions and consolidating information about teaching-track positions at various universities together into an online database.

The pace of technology for use in computing education is staggering. In the last five years, the following tools / websites have completely transformed our teaching: Piazza, Google Docs, YouTube, Doodle and whenisgood.net, Skype and Google Hangout, and Khan Academy among others. Hardware has also played a part -- we love our Zoom H2 digital voice recorder (for recording CD-quality lecture audio), Blue Yeti USB mike (for audio/videoconferences), and iClickers (for engaging students in class).

In his SIGCSE 2007 keynote, Grady Booch exhorted us to share the "passion, beauty, joy and awe" (PBJA) of computing. This led to sessions that have provided a forum for sharing: What we've done: Highlighting successful PBJA initiatives the presenters have undertaken or seen and wish to trumpet; What we should do (curriculum): Pointing out where our curriculum is lacking in PBJA, and how to fix it; How we should do it (pedagogy): Sharing how a change in attitude/focus/etc. can make strides to improving PBJA.

One man's "magic" is another man's engineering. Robert A. Heinlein

The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is an introductory computer science curriculum developed at UC Berkeley (and adapted at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte), intended for high school juniors through university non-majors. It was used in two of the five initial pilot programs for the AP CS Principles course being developed by the College Board and the National Science Foundation. Our overall goal is to support the CS10K project by preparing instructors to teach the AP CS Principles course through the BJC curriculum. In this workshop, we will share our experiences as instructors of the course at the university and high school level, provide a glimpse into a typical week of the course, and share details of NSF-funded summer professional development opportunities.

This workshop is for high school and college teachers of general-interest ("CS 0") CS courses. It presents the programming environment used in two of the five initial AP CS Principles pilot courses.

Many computer science departments have chosen to hire faculty to teach in a teaching-track position that parallels the standard tenure-track position. These teaching-track positions include the possibility for promotion, longer-term contracts and greater pay as demonstrated by excellence in teaching, educational material development, and service. Since this type of position is relatively new in CS departments, the expectations and responsibilities for such faculty varies from one university to another, but they certainly differ from the traditional tenure-track positions. This birds-of-a-feather is designed to gather educators who are currently in such a position to share their experiences as members of the faculty of their departments and schools, and to provide opportunities for schools considering such positions to gather information. In past sessions, we have laid the groundwork for keeping this community together through online discussions and consolidating information about teaching-track positions at various universities together into an online database.

Much of computing education research is devoted to introductory computer science. The articles in this special issue look at the other end of the spectrum: learning advanced subjects, here, concurrent, parallel and distributed computation. The articles present four approaches for teaching these subjects using infra-structure that is feasible for educational institutions to acquire: MapReduce in a cloud, remote computing on a multicore system, a network of gaming consoles, and software modeling using formal specification.

In 2006, computing education was suffering from a crisis - enrollments were dropping sharply at universities and colleges across the United States, and interest in computing from high school and middle school students was waning significantly. At the 2007 SIGCSE Symposium, the ACM Education Board organized a special session to explore the underlying causes. In his keynote at the same conference, 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 four SIGCSE symposia to explore that idea from different angles. They have provided a forum for sharing: "What we've done: Highlighting successful PBJA initiatives the presenters have undertaken or seen and wish to celebrate. "What we should do (curriculum): Pointing out where our curriculum is lacking in PBJA, and how to fix it. "How we should do it (pedagogy): Sharing how a change in attitude / focus / etc. can make strides to improving PBJA.

One of the most important tasks an introductory computing student must do is to form a mental model of how the computer works. This could be as specific as understanding the read-evaluate-print loop of an interpreter, or as general as believing that the computer works predictably and deterministically. However, some have fuzzy mental models, or worse, sincerely believe that the computer works unpredictably, "by magic". We seek to demystify computing for these students using analogy, by showing them something that even magic itself isn't really mystical, it is just computation.

The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is an introductory computer science curriculum developed at the University of California, Berkeley (and adapted at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte), intended for high school juniors through university non-majors. It was used in two of the five initial pilot programs for the AP CS Principles course being developed by the College Board and the National Science Foundation. Our overall goal is to support the CS10K project by preparing instructors to teach the AP CS Principles course through the BJC curriculum. In this workshop, we will share our experiences as instructors of the course at the university and high school level, provide a glimpse into a typical week of the course, and share details of NSF-funded summer professional development opportunities.

Many computer science departments have chosen to hire faculty to teach in a teaching-track position that parallels the standard tenure-track position, providing the possibility of promotion, longer-term contracts, and higher pay for excellence in teaching and service. This birds-of-a-feather is designed to gather educators who are currently in such a position to share their experiences as members of the faculty of their departments and schools, and to provide opportunities for schools considering such positions to gather information.

The pace of technology for use in computing education is staggering. In the last five years, the following tools / websites have completely transformed our teaching: Piazza, Google Docs, YouTube, Doodle and whenisgood.net, Skype and Google Hangout, and Khan Academy among others. Hardware has also played a part - we love our Zoom H2 digital voice recorder (for recording CD-quality lecture audio), Blue Yeti USB mike (for audio/videoconferences), and iClickers (for engaging students in class). Do you wish you could easily share your favorites? Want to find out what the others know that you don't? Have a tool you've built and want to get some users? Come to this BOF! We'll also show the TECH website we've built that attempts to collect all of these tools in one place.

This workshop is for high school and college teachers of general-interest ("CS 0") computer science courses. It presents the programming environment used in two of the five initial AP CS Principles pilot courses. Snap! (Build Your Own Blocks) is a free, graphical, drag-and-drop extension to the Scratch programming language. Scratch, designed for 8-14 year olds, models programs as "scripts" without names, arguments, or return values. Snap! supports older learners (14-20) by adding named procedures (thus recursion), procedures as data (thus higher order functions) structured lists, and sprites as first class objects with inheritance.

Since 2008, NSF and The College Board, have been developing a "Computer Science: Principles" curriculum to "introduce students to the central ideas of computing and CS, to instill ideas and practices of computational thinking, and to have students engage in activities that show how computing and CS change the world". We report on the initial pilot of the CS Principles curriculum at 5 universities in 2010/11. The instructors from the pilot schools will describe their classes, the piloting experience (teaching under a microscope), and successes and failures. Emphasis will be on: mapping the CS Principles curriculum to a college's specific needs, and how others can use or modify the existing materials for pilots at their schools.

We often learn of successful pedagogical experiments, but we seldom hear of the the ones that failed. For this special session we solicited submissions from the SIGCSE membership, selected the best from among these, and will have presentations at the session by the selected authors. Our contributions describe pedagogical approaches that seemed to be good ideas but turned out as failures. Contributors will describe their pedagogical experiment, the rationale for the experiment, evidence of failure, and lessons learned.

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 2006, computing education was suffering from a crisis - enrollments were dropping sharply at universities and colleges across the United States, and interest in computing from high school and middle school students was waning significantly. At the 2007 SIGCSE Symposium, the ACM Education Board organized a special session to explore the underlying causes [7]. In his keynote at the same conference, Grady Booch exhorted us to share the "passion, beauty, joy and awe" (PBJA) of computing [4]. This led to a series of room-packed sessions at the following three SIGCSE symposia to explore that idea from different perspectives [8, 9, 12]. They have provided a forum for sharing: " What we've done: Highlighting successful PBJA initiatives the presenters have undertaken or seen and wish to celebrate. - What we should do (curriculum): Pointing out where our curriculum is lacking in PBJA, and how to fix it. - How we should do it (pedagogy): Sharing how a change in attitude / focus / etc. can make strides to improving PBJA. Fortunately, enrollments have been continually rising, and there are colleges where the numbers are so strong (returning to historic highs), that some claim the crisis is over [10, 13]. Many dispute this, however, citing statistics that indicate under-represented students have not returned, and continuing negative connotations about the field [2]. Also, recent news of limited hiring in the information technology sector could have a damping affect [11]. This PBJA "movement" was born out of this enrollment crisis, but is not tied to it. There is always value in sharing novel best practices and advocating techniques that make computing fun. In the past, we tried to gather educators who brought a wide variety of perspectives (e.g., in 2010 we heard from international, domestic, high school, university and industrial representatives). This year, we've shifted from that "breadth-first" model to a "depth-first" one, and have invited three K-12 teachers who, collectively, have taught computing at an all-girls middle school, an under-served high school, and an affluent high school. The hope with this panel is to be able to drill down and understand the K-12 space, in terms of extolling the PBJA of computing.

The Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology is a decade-old endeavor to expose pre-college young women and underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities to the fields of computer science and engineering, and prepare them for rigorous, university-level study. We have served more than 150 students, and graduated more than 65 seniors who have gone on to attend some of the top institutions in the country. Some of the lessons we have learned include the importance of sustained funding to support a continuing year-round program, world-class leaders and resources, and family and alumni involvement. In this article, we share the inner workings of our program, from its foundation during the dot-com heyday through today, in hopes that our best practices can be useful to others working toward the goal of broadening participation.

No abstract available.

Computational Thinking (CT) has been articulated as a "fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists" [10]. Almost all agree with the lofty goals of the initiative, to teach humanity the ability to see the world through the sharpened eyes of a computer scientist. Others have shared their vision of what CT is, how to pave the way [7], weave it into a curriculum [1, 2, 9], and what the effects might be [8]. However, what does it really mean to be a computational thinker? While it is helpful to see examples that show we're already engaged in CT (e.g., using a backpack is pre-fetching and caching), it is perhaps more valuable to see everyday situations that are transformed when viewed through a computational thinker's trained eyes (e.g., writing dates as YYYY-MM-DD so they'll sort correctly). We hope to present enough examples to satisfy a growing chorus of those who need more grounding, using a unique delivery format.

For several years, the lectures in our introductory Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) courses have been videotaped and webcast, mainly as an aid to students with time conflicts that prevent them from attending class. We present the Weiner Lecture Archives - a project to identify, archive, filter, and make available the best of these lectures with their notes on the web. We provide a hierarchical, ontology-driven interface to entire courses, which allows users to choose any topic and/or subtopic to view, from a small snippet of one lecture to one that spans many lectures. Once the topic is chosen, our system launches RealPlayer to play the lecture video in one window while showing synchronized lecture notes or slides in another window. By the spring of 2007, we had finished encoding our department's entire four-course introductory sequence into this system. Student and worldwide use was greater than 100,000 views last year alone, direct feedback has been encouraging, and we hope to expand to other EECS courses in the future.

Computer Science Illustrated1 is an endeavor to help visual learners comprehend computer science topics through a series of resolution-independent illustrations, which are made available online for use as handouts in class and posters in the computer labs. These illustrations are designed to present concepts as engaging and memorable visual metaphors combined with concise explanations or short narratives, intended to maintain the students' interest and facilitate retention. An additional goal of the project is to make learning the concepts an entertaining experience through the use of colorful and whimsical characters in the illustrations. In producing our twenty-seven illustrations, we determined which topics were most difficult for students to understand in our university's introductory computer science courses and followed a step-by-step process of design, redesign, and revision to generate our illustrations. We also assessed the effectiveness of our creations, using both subjective and objective measures.

Comprehending and debugging computer programs are inherently difficult tasks for sighted programmers. These tasks are even more difficult for non-sighted programmers, who rely on audio-based representations of programs. The state-of-the-art approach to building program execution and debugging environments for non-sighted programmers is to retrofit existing visual environments with screen readers. Because of intrinsic differences in the ways humans process auditory and visual information, we argue that these environments are insensitive to the needs of the blind community. We present an alternative: SODBeans (the SonifiedOmniscient Debugger in Netbeans), a compiler, debugger, and accessibility architecture for Netbeans 6.5.

We often learn of successful pedagogical experiments, but we seldom hear of the the ones that failed. For this special session we solicited submissions from the SIGCSE membership, selected the best from among these, and will have presentations at the session by the selected authors. Our contributions describe pedagogical approaches that seemed to be good ideas but turned out as failures. Contributors will describe their pedagogical experiment, the rationale for the experiment, evidence of failure, and lessons learned.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

Randomness and probability are essential notions in CS studies. They are invoked and employed in diverse courses at different levels. Although a structured course on these notions does not usually appear early in the curriculum, students and educators may benefit from their encapsulation already in CS0 and CS1. The special session will involve motivation, demonstration, and discussion with the audience of the assets of such an encapsulation. Attending CS educators will enrich their teaching perspectives, pedagogical tools, and assignment repertoires.

No abstract available.

It is not rare that programming students are surprised when they encounter bugs in their program, which "looks completely right". Such a phenomenon expresses lack of awareness of analysis, design, and testing habits, which yield undesirable outcomes. The special session will focus on various programming aspects that may look seemingly right to students, but yield a buggy, wrong result. Various aspects will be displayed, illustrated, and discussed with the audience, in order to better understand the characteristics of bugs and ways of coping with them in our teaching.

At recent SIGCSE conferences, there appeared to be a refreshing revival of interest in game theory as a valuable pedagogical tool for educators [4,5]. Games can serve as an excellent resource for CS0, CS1, networking, user interface and software engineering projects. Games can be utilized to motivate students, enrich their intuition, and illustrate fundamental principles of algorithm design such as exploration of regularities, modularity, correctness, and efficiency. Many CS instructors look for ways to motivate, improve intuition, and illustrate the subject matter they teach, and games are a wonderful means of doing so.

The 'Aha!' phenomenon is familiar to us in many domains including computer science and mathematics (e.g., [2,3,6]). It often stems from an unexpected point of view that illuminates an appealing solution path. The 'Aha' reaction is common to all. Its occurrence is related to the problem-solvers' common perspectives and solution repertoires. Whether more frequent or less frequent, 'Aha' occurrences enrich and strengthen perspectives and repertoires in a stimulating manner.Consider the following Ladder Problem: calculate the number of different ways to climb an N-stage ladder when each step is either one or two stages. One solution perspective may be 'forward reasoning', leading to a systematic accumulation of the possible climbing paths. Another perspective may be combinatorial, leading to the calculation of all the combinations of 1 and 2 that sum to N. A third perspective may be 'backward reasoning', yielding recursive decomposition of the Nth case into the N-1 and N-2 cases.Some problem-solvers may fairly quickly invoke the third perspective and elegantly obtain the Nth Fibonacci number. Others may first follow one of the other perspectives and later realize the illuminating third perspective. The 'Aha' reactions among the solvers may vary. However, both less experienced and more experienced solvers will gain from recognizing the relevance and elegance of the recursive decomposition and enhance their problem-solving repertoires.

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/