Socially Responsible Computing (SRC) education entails the infusion of Computer Science (CS) education with interwoven attention to ethical, social, and political issues to position students to reflect and take action individually and collaboratively to create a more just world. Our approach to SRC supports students to explore computing design/development in early CS courses with a communal goal orientation (in contrast to agentic/individualized), shown to improve achievement and retention for students with identities that are minoritized in CS. Grounded in our own experiences as co-developers and implementers of this pedagogical transformation and as co-facilitators of a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) across six minority-serving institutions in California, we share how we use an iterative design and implementation process modeled from social design experimentation as research and development method. Initial results are presented as a set of promising practices for incorporating SRC into introductory CS courses: 1) choose the domain mindfully; 2) design for synergy with technical material; 3) scaffold for inclusivity; 4) structure with a framework; 5) avoid othering SRC elements; and 6) reuse and build on existing resources. We share how these promising practices guide our efforts; how they can address challenges and concerns for new and continuing SRC implementers; and the ways in which we have and will continue to test and co-design this approach.

A student's sense of belonging in computing can be positively impacted when coursework can authentically be connected to real community contexts. We describe the design, materials, and preliminary evaluation of an introductory programming (CS0) course infused with a focus on societal responsibility and relevance. We take a data-centric, constructionist approach to introductory computing. Data-centricity allows us to authentically connect coursework with students' communal and societal interests, and students' motivation was enhanced given that they were creating and sharing artifacts as part of their coursework. Students used TypeScript to manipulate and analyze real data-sets, and created shareable websites containing statistics, data visualizations, and reflections based on the data-set of their choosing. Students chose varied topics for their assignments-they worked with data about access to CS education, climate change, and data provided by local non-profit organizations. A preliminary evaluation indicated that students who took this CS0 course attained CS-specific learning objectives equally well in the two subsequent follow-on courses as students who took alternative CS0 courses at our University. We close with instructor perspectives and reflections on lessons learned.

Computing is a large and growing presence in society in 2020, and like many others, we see a strong demand from non-computing majors for "CS For All" courses. Unlike many others, we do not feel that putting traditional programming first is the best way to do this. Instead, we are rethinking the way we introduce computing to allow a broad audience to engage with this discipline.

We examine the effects of creative choice in fifth grade computer science curriculum on students' engagement/preferences, performance, and self-efficacy (n=107). This work is rooted in evaluating creativity as a tool to increase engagement in elementary school computer science education by studying a group of one hundred fifth grade students at a public charter school in California. The work occurred within a year long computing curriculum focused on introducing students to programming. To experimentally evaluate creative choice over a six week period, we created several instances of two variants of worksheets for the students - creative worksheets and more rigid worksheets, alternating control and experimental groupings. After the treatment, surveys and quizzes were used to evaluate students' experiences and learning. We found that students benefit from a blend of creative and structured instructions and can feel a sense of ownership with even limited versions of creative choice. In addition, student performance was not affected by our different treatments.

Computer Science and programming are changing the world, but not everyone has equal access to education about this field. In California, Juvenile hall students typically lack opportunities to learn computer programming. In this paper, we present an experience report about the course we created to address the needs of this population. Specifically, we created and taught an introductory computing course focused on engagement. This project-based game design curriculum was launched to a small cohort of the juvenile hall in spring 2019. This course focused on engaging students while introducing computing programming concepts such as variables, logic and function. Student surveys and reports from their teacher showed this class had a positive impact and was well received by students and staff. We hypothesize and show initial positive indication that creative, game-oriented curriculum had a positive impact on the demographic. We also present some of the challenges encountered when working within the juvenile hall system and our solutions and general recommendations for these types of classes.

Sixty percent of Americans play video games daily, with 45% of U.S. gamers identifying as female. Based on a 2017 survey by the International Game Developers Association, only 22% of the game industry is composed of women, while 81% of all respondents rated diversity in the workplace as important. This begs the question, how can we promote a more gender diverse gaming industry? Academic settings, such as courses focused on game design, offer the opportunity for women and men to experiment, learn and play, while earning self-confidence and a sense that they equally belong to the field. Diversity of content in gaming is in demand and both genders' perspectives are needed. Understanding how game design approaches may or may not differ across genders can help inform pedagogical and curricular choices within academia. In this study, we observe students' design preferences in the making of video games over a five year period, and analyze how student game designers' choices with regard to elements such as setting and game-play fit into the conversation of promoting inclusive game design. We examine whether different groups of student game designers create different games. In particular, our study focuses on teams that are composed of at least half female designers and those with less than half female team members. The results from two analyses that examined genre, setting, mood, aesthetic and others, showed no statistically significant difference among the two groups, with the exception of one criterion related to the presence of identifiable enemies. This study points to the fact that shared foci across genders are prevalent, indicating fruitful avenues for future game development that may be broadly appealing and inclusive.

The use of virtual reality as an assistance technology is of wide interest [2, 9, 10]. In particular, recent work in the use of virtual reality to help users manage psychological challenges has been fruitful [5, 7, 11]. In this poster, we present a student capstone project, focused on studying users experience focused on anxiety driven by task completion.

As frequent users of social networking applications, middle and high school students are well-suited for curricular interventions that leverage these technologies. Allowing students to see "behind the curtain" of these applications provides them with a unique opportunity to better understand the discipline of computer science upon which these technologies are built and influences their perceptions of computer security and privacy. We present a novel social networking simulation that allows students to create a social network account, including profile data and images, and to manage privacy settings and friend connections. The platform, named Fakesbook, presents students with a visualization of the social network as a graph, enabling them to observe the spread of profile data (theirs and others') depending on friend connections and choices of privacy settings. We additionally present our lab curriculum which uses Fakesbook to enable active learning and adversarial thinking to engage students and build agency with regard to privacy and computing concepts. We deployed and, over several years, evaluated our platform and curriculum with hundreds of students from a diverse set of backgrounds at educational events designed to introduce these populations to computer science, cybersecurity, and privacy. Survey results indicate that students gained or deepened their understanding of online privacy and security and that 86% of participants found that Fakesbook helped them "think about privacy and computer security."

This paper presents an autonomous robot system that is designed to autonomously search for and geo-localize potential underwater archaeological sites. The system, based on Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, invokes a multi-step pipeline. First, the AUV constructs a high altitude scan over a large area to collect low-resolution side scan sonar data. Second, image processing software is employed to automatically detect and identify potential sites of interest. Third, a ranking algorithm assigns importance scores to each site. Fourth, an AUV path planner is used to plan a time-limited path that visits sites with a high importance at a low altitude to acquire high-resolution sonar data. Last, the AUV is deployed to follow this path. This system was implemented and evaluated during an archaeological survey located along the coast of Malta. These experiments demonstrated that the system is able to identify valuable archaeological sites accurately and efficiently in a large previously unsurveyed area. Also, the planned missions led to the discovery of a historical plane wreck whose location was previously unknown.

Since 2010, the Cal Poly Computer Science Department has required computing majors to select from a variety of CS0 courses to start their academic year. The broad objective of the course is to attract and retain undergraduates that have no prior experience in CS by using authentic problems that demonstrate the relevance and highlight the role of computers in solving "real world" problems. The course is offered in a variety of thematic "flavors" that leverage a student's pre-existing interests (e.g. in music or art), but all share the common goals of introducing students to the basics of programming, teamwork, and college-level study. While there is overlap in overall goals, the courses vary drastically in topic matter (e.g. robotics, gaming, music, computational art, mobile apps, security) and in pedagogical approach (e.g. principles of design, project-based student driven learning, and traditional topic-based programming modules). The introduction of this CS0 course has increased students' commitment to their major and success in follow-on classes. We present these successes and show that student GPAs in a follow-on object oriented programming course do not vary significantly for the differing subtopics and teaching pedagogies employed in the various flavors. Our report includes examining two student subgroups (those experienced with programming and those new to programming). Our evaluations suggest that the existence and goal of the course matter more than the specific content, with all subtopics and pedagogical approaches performing well.

This paper presents a method for constructing 3D maps of marine archaeological sites using deployments of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) equipped with sonar and cameras. The method requires multiple AUV missions in which the first mission directs the AUV to conduct a high altitude lawnmower scan over the area to create a course bathymetry map using sonar. Subsequent AUV missions then direct the AUV to make low altitude fly-overs just above the wreck with the goal of obtaining camera images from multiple viewpoints of the wreck to enable offboard 3D mapping via photogrammetric reconstruction. This approach uses a coarse map generated after the first mission to construct AUV paths that attempt to maximize information gain, i.e. maximize the number of viewpoints of the wreck within a time limit. Presented is a motion planner derived from Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees (RRT) that have sampling strategies modified for this problem. Specifically, the random node selection and new node generation are designed to consider the kinematics of an AUV and the information gain associated with each flyover. Simulation results demonstrate improvements of up to 152% when these sampling strategies are used. Experiment results, involving deployments for mapping two known wrecks located along the coast of Malta, validate the system's ability to construct 3D maps and associated visualizations.

Integrating programming and computer science into the K-12 curriculum is of national importance. This poster reports on our experience creating an eighteen-week lab curriculum for fifth grade students. Using Processing, an open source programming language and IDE that is built on the Java programming language, we developed and taught eighteen separate lab components introducing basic coding concepts appropriate for fifth grade. These lab modules were developed by a team consisting of a fifth grade teacher, a computer science master's student, and a computer science professor. The labs were taught to over 100 fifth grade students in the 2014-15 academic school year at a public school, Peabody Charter School. All coding labs produced visual output, either static scenes or animations. Topics included basic syntax with a large focus on two dimensional spatial reasoning, but also included three different modules focused on concepts from the fifth grade science curriculum. All curriculum is available at http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~zwood/Outreach/PCS/PCS5.html. This poster breaks down the basic lab components developed and presents challenges and positive outcomes. In general, students enjoyed the exercises; the teacher observed that all students were eager to complete the labs. Prior to this experience the teacher had no programming knowledge and learned alongside the students each week. He continues to teach the Processing modules in the fifth grade for the 2015-16 school year.

Introducing computer science to high school students in a creative context, and fitting such a course into an overly packed high school curriculum, is a challenge. This paper describes a fruitful collaboration to create and teach an alternative introductory computing curriculum for high school students targeted at introducing students to computing via an artistic context. This curriculum allows students to be introduced to computing in a highly interest based context, attracting diverse student body participation (25% female students in the first offering and 38% female students in the present 2015-16 offering). This curriculum also fulfills student's fine art course requirement making it more readily accessible to a wide audience to `try out' CS while making progress on their academic goals. This curriculum has been used as a successful introduction to computing at the Santa Barbara High School CS Academy in the 2014-2015 school year and is currently being offered again this year. In this paper, we present the curriculum and evaluation of this initial offering.

When teaching introductory computing courses, we are often guilty of writing rudimentary programming assignments - those meant to illustrate one simple language feature, comprised mostly of code that will never be used beyond the assignment. Admittedly, first-year computing students must navigate a myriad of challenges, sometimes learning both imperative and object-oriented programming, in addition to mastering syntax, logic,debugging, and testing. To tackle the difficulties of developing CS 1 and CS 2 courses that engage students in learning while addressing the numerous course objectives, we chose to challenge students to create virtual worlds in one large comprehensive two-quarter long programming project. Students were granted creative freedom within a framework that gradually introduced many programming skills and that required the mastery of object-oriented programming and some engaging algorithms. We present the curriculum, performance comparisons, and observations. Overall, we consider the experimental courses a success that will have an impact on our department's future curricular offerings.

Massively parallel Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) hardware has become increasingly powerful, available and affordable. Software tools have also advanced to the point that programmers can write general purpose parallel programs that take advantage of the large number of compute cores available in the hardware. With literally hundreds of compute cores available on a single device, program performance can increase by orders of magnitude. We believe that introducing students to the concepts of parallel programming for massively parallel hardware is of increasing importance in an undergraduate computer science curriculum. Furthermore, we believe that students learn best when given projects that reflect real problems in computer science. This paper describes the experience of integrating two undergraduate computer science courses to enhance student learning in parallel computing concepts. In this cross teaching experience we structured the integration of the courses such that students studying parallel computing worked with students studying advanced rendering for approximately 30% of the quarter long courses. Working in teams on a joint project, both groups of students were able to see the application of parallelization to an existing software project with both the benefits and complications exposed early in the curriculum of both courses. Motivating projects and performance gains are discussed, as well as student survey data on the effectiveness of the learning outcomes. Both performance and survey data indicate a positive gain from the cross teaching experience.

Many high-resolution surfaces are created through isosurface extraction from volumetric representations, obtained by 3D photography, CT, or MRI. Noise inherent in the acquisition process can lead to geometrical and topological errors. Reducing geometrical errors during reconstruction is well studied. However, isosurfaces often contain many topological errors in the form of tiny handles. These nearly invisible artifacts hinder subsequent operations like mesh simplification, remeshing, and parametrization. In this article we present a practical method for removing handles in an isosurface. Our algorithm makes an axis-aligned sweep through the volume to locate handles, compute their sizes, and selectively remove them. The algorithm is designed to facilitate out-of-core execution. It finds the handles by incrementally constructing and analyzing a Reeb graph. The size of a handle is measured by a short nonseparating cycle. Handles are removed robustly by modifying the volume rather than attempting "mesh surgery." Finally, the volumetric modifications are spatially localized to preserve geometrical detail. We demonstrate topology simplification on several complex models, and show its benefits for subsequent surface processing.

We present a novel method to extract iso-surfaces from distance volumes. It generates high quality semi-regular multiresolution meshes of arbitrary topology. Our technique proceeds in two stages. First, a very coarse mesh with guaranteed topology is extracted. Subsequently an iterative multi-scale force-based solver refines the initial mesh into a semi-regular mesh with geometrically adaptive sampling rate and good aspect ratio triangles. The coarse mesh extraction is performed using a new approach we call surface wavefront propagation. A set of discrete iso-distance ribbons are rapidly built and connected while respecting the topology of the iso-surface implied by the data. Subsequent multi-scale refinement is driven by a simple force-based solver designed to combine good iso-surface fit and high quality sampling through reparameterization. In contrast to the Marching Cubes technique our output meshes adapt gracefully to the iso-surface geometry, have a natural multiresolution structure and good aspect ratio triangles, as demonstrated with a number of examples.