Cybersecurity professionals must anticipate how attackers exploit system weaknesses -- a perspective known as ''adversarial thinking'' (AT). While cybersecurity education emphasizes the development of AT skills, there is little consensus on what these skills entail or how to assess them. We conducted a scoping review of computing education literature and semi-structured interviews (N=8) with cybersecurity professionals to better understand how adversarial thinking (AT) manifests in both academia and industry. Our analysis of 19 academic papers found that adversarial thinking is frequently described through system-centric approaches and/or hacker-centric definitions, with both presenting it as an open-ended creative exploration. However in practice, time constraints force cybersecurity professionals to develop a risk-based mindset and rely on institutionalized adversarial knowledge rather than a constant creative analysis. Our professionals strategically deploy adversarial thinking when standardized checklists feel inadequate or when potential risks warrant a deeper investigation. This paper contributes an empirically grounded account of how AT operates under professional constraints, and identify implications for how cybersecurity education can better prepare students.

Computing education faces a unique challenge when teaching debugging skills to teachers who do not have a formal computer science background but who will need to learn programming to teach CS courses. While most debugging research about post-secondary learners focuses on preparing students for the technology industry, teacher professional development (PD) programs often serve a different population: teachers who are simultaneously learning computing knowledge and the pedagogical skills to teach it effectively. Through semi-structured interviews with seven facilitators of computing PD programs, this study explores how experienced PD facilitators approach the concept of debugging and instruct teachers in the process of debugging. We use reflexive thematic analysis to show how teacher PD differs from debugging recommendations in post-secondary CS: Rather than focusing on understanding the root causes of errors, facilitators scaffold the teachers' process of identifying and locating bugs to aid teachers in more quickly producing working programs, which they see as important for supporting teachers' confidence. This practical approach acknowledges the time constraints of PD workshops. Finding and understanding bugs is the most difficult part of the debugging process and is something post-secondary students struggle with even after completing one or two semesters of CS courses. These insights challenge assumptions about debugging pedagogy and highlight the need to carefully consider when new CS teachers should learn error analysis skills.

As computing's societal impact grows, so does the need for computing students to recognize and address the ethical and sociotechnical implications of their work. While there are efforts to integrate ethics into computing curricula, we lack a standardized tool to measure those efforts, specifically, students' attitudes towards ethical reflection and their ability to effect change. This paper introduces the novel framework of Critically Conscious Computing and reports on the development and content validation of the Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing Index, a novel instrument designed to assess undergraduate computing students' attitudes towards practicing critically conscious computing. The resulting index is a theoretically grounded, expert-reviewed tool to support research and practice in computing ethics education. This enables researchers and educators to gain insights into students' perspectives, inform the design of targeted ethics interventions, and measure the effectiveness of computing ethics education initiatives.

Computing ethics education aims to develop students' critical reflection and agency. We need validated ways to measure whether our efforts succeed. Through two survey administrations (N=474, N=464) with computing students and professionals, we provide evidence for the validity of the Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing Index. Our psychometric analyses demonstrate distinct dimensions of ethical development and show strong reliability and construct validity. Participants who completed computing ethics courses showed higher scores in some dimensions of ethical reflection and agency, but they also exhibited stronger techno-solutionist beliefs, highlighting a challenge in current pedagogy. This validated instrument enables systematic measurement of how computing students develop critical consciousness, allowing educators to better understand how to prepare computing professionals to tackle ethical challenges in their work.

Emergent bilingual (EB) students are a growing demographic within the United States, with an increasing number enrolling in K-12 computing courses. Since programming languages are primarily grounded in English, K-12 computing teachers must balance and tailor their instruction to meet the needs of these students. Teachers reported a lack of sufficient computing education resources to guide their instruction for teaching computing to EB students. Through a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with eight K-12 computing teachers who have EB students in their classrooms, we identified some of the challenges they face and the strategies they use to support them. Our analysis revealed three challenges: (1) students experience cognitive overload from translating between English and their native language, (2) terminology has subtle differences across disciplines (e.g., 'variable' in Math vs. Science), and (3) educators' low computing self-efficacy. Teachers counter these challenges with two implemented strategies: (1) providing multiple ways for EB students to engage with content to prevent them from becoming overwhelmed, and (2) offering multiple modalities to help translate computing concepts. This study contributes to the ongoing discussion on inclusive computing education by offering insights into educators' needs and potential solutions for supporting EB students' learning in computing.

The goal of teaching everyone computing (explicitly including programming) predates the definition of the computer science (CS) major and even the prospect of a software development career. At the University of Michigan, we are creating courses for non-CS majors which are grounded in the computational practices of liberal arts and sciences faculty. These courses have no connection to the CS major curriculum or software development jobs. We focus here on two of the themes that those faculty valued (Computing for Expression and Computing for Justice) and the introductory courses that we designed around each theme. The courses emphasize gaining broad perspectives of computing, which serve the study of multiple disciplines. Student activities include readings, writing essays, classroom discussion, and open-ended programming homework assignments. This experience report describes our design process, the Creative Expression and Social Justice courses, and an initial evaluation of our design. Most of the programming assignments were written in the block-based programming language Snap!, with some in-class exercises using teaspoon languages. Several units ended with an ebook assignment to connect the Snap! programming to equivalent programs in Python, Processing, and SQL. Interview and survey findings suggest that students found this sequence and the courses useful, despite not counting toward a CS major or focusing on early software development skills. Students described usefulness in terms of developing general computing knowledge, preparation for a range of future careers, and introducing them to other course choices.

As discussions of computing's impact on society increase in public discourse, so does recognition for computing students to address the ethical and sociotechnical implications of their work. While efforts to integrate issues of ethics and social justice into computing curricula are nascent, we lack a standardized measure to monitor our progress towards these goals. In this poster, we report on the development and validation of the Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing Index, a novel instrument designed to assess undergraduate computing students' attitudes towards practicing critically conscious computing. The resulting index is a theoretically grounded, expert-reviewed tool with evidence for reliability and validity to support research and practice in computing ethics education. This enables researchers and educators to gain insights into students' perspectives, inform the design of targeted ethics interventions, and monitor the effectiveness of computing ethics education initiatives.

The capability of large language models (LLMs) to generate, debug, and explain code has sparked the interest of researchers and educators in undergraduate programming, with many anticipating their transformative potential in programming education. However, decisions about why and how to use LLMs in programming education may involve more than just the assessment of an LLM’s technical capabilities. Using the social shaping of technology theory as a guiding framework, our study explores how students’ social perceptions influence their own LLM usage. We then examine the correlation of self-reported LLM usage with students’ self-efficacy and midterm performances in an undergraduate programming course. Triangulating data from an anonymous end-of-course student survey (n = 158), a mid-course self-efficacy survey (n=158), student interviews (n = 10), self-reported LLM usage on homework, and midterm performances, we discovered that students’ use of LLMs was associated with their expectations for their future careers and their perceptions of peer usage. Additionally, early self-reported LLM usage in our context correlated with lower self-efficacy and lower midterm scores, while students’ perceived over-reliance on LLMs, rather than their usage itself, correlated with decreased self-efficacy later in the course.

There are now many large datasets available for programming education research. They tend to be very large-scale, but often lack context or detailed participant information. This ''big data'' is in contrast to the ''rich data'' that has generally been collected from smaller, qualitative studies, with detailed context and participant information. Big data is often criticised for its lack of context, while rich data is often criticised for its small sample size which makes generalisable conclusions dubious. In this position paper we examine the constraints, advantages, and disadvantages of each type of data, and discuss how they can provide differing information on phenomena in programming education research. We argue that both types of data are useful and that we should value the potential findings of each, as well as encourage their combination in order to provide a complete picture of how people learn to program.

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

Programming is a useful medium for artists and humanities majors. Learning to program provides a useful set of skills and concepts for critical computing scholars and conversational programmers. Introductory computing classes (at both secondary and post-secondary) level focus on job skills in software development or data science, which is a different focus from what arts and humanities students need. We have been developing new introductory computing courses for arts and humanities undergraduate students, explicitly including programming. The courses were designed using participatory methods with faculty who focus on creative expression and justice. The goal was to make them engaging with no requirement for prior programming background or mathematics past algebra. We use teaspoon (task-specific programming) languages and custom blocks in Snap to create a highly-scaffolded on-ramp into programming. These include supports for image processing, language recognition and generation, digital sound manipulation, creating Web pages, building chatbots, and manipulating databases. The workshop will include a presentation of the learning goals that emerged from our participatory design sessions. Participants will use our teaspoon languages and context-specific Snap! blocks during the workshop on their own laptops, and also try out the ebooks we use to help students transfer their knowledge to mainstream tools like Python, Processing, and SQL. These activities might also be useful in secondary school computing classes. (Links to all of the tools will be provided, though only some will be used hands-on in the workshop.)

In response to the enrollment surge that started in many CS depart- ments around 2006, the Computing Research Association published a report on "Generation CS", which named a pervasive theme in computing education: more and a greater diversity of students are seeking computing education, even if not as traditional CS ma- jors. However, our curricula and departments have stayed much the same. We still mostly prepare students for software develop- ment jobs in the technology industry, while we rarely identify the damage that same industry has caused in our democratic societies. How do we do better? How do we change to meet the needs of a changing society? What strategies should we apply? We know that large-scale change will require structural shifts, but such shifts are likely to be slow and expensive, whereas smaller, "boots on the ground" initiatives can positively impact individuals but do little to change the systems that underlie the deeper-seated problems in computing. Navigating this paradox is imperative to our success as a field. Our panel will address the big questions about how to make structural changes in computing education in order to meet the greater needs of Generation CS.

Digital photographs are part of liberal arts students' classes (e.g., art, history, and production classes in film and television) and their daily smartphone-based life, in apps like Instagram and Snapchat. Building image filters can be a relevant and engaging context into using computing for humanities students. We have designed a new course for introducing computing in terms of creative expression. We use a scaffolded sequence of programming languages and activities to explore computing on photographs: (a) a teaspoon language for generating image filters, (b) a set of custom Snap blocks for even more sophisticated image filters, and (c) an ebook activity for mapping from Snap to Python. Each stage takes less than 10 minutes to introduce, with a wide variety of possible student activities (for in-class active learning or for later homework). While the tools build on each other, the earliest stage (the teaspoon language) could be used within a single class session in other liberal arts courses.

Language is a key topic of interest for students in the humanities -- language is the way in which humans express themselves, communicate, and make art. Computing on language (e.g., recognizing language, generating language, building bots) can be a pathway into using computing for humanities contexts. At the University of Michigan, we are developing a new program to support students in liberal arts and sciences to learn about computing, explicitly including programming. We have designed two courses for introducing computing (1) in terms of creative expression and (2) around the implications of computing on justice. In both classes, we use a scaffolded sequence of programming languages and activities to explore computing on language: (a) a teaspoon language for sentence generation and recognition, (b) a set of custom Snap blocks for sentence generation and recognition, (c) a set of custom Snap blocks for building Chatbots, and (d) an ebook activity for mapping from Snap to Python. Each language takes less than 10 minutes to introduce, with a wide variety of possible student activities (for in-class active learning or for later homework). While the tools build on each other, the earliest stage (the teaspoon language) could be used within a single class session in linguistics, communications, or other liberal arts courses.

K-12 teachers seek examples of relevant and appropriate content that engages a diverse audience for their courses. Naturally, teachers may look to universities for inspiration and even curriculum and course content. In this innovative practice paper, the researchers worked with an urban public high school that had an existing partnership with our home university; this was a natural place for high school teachers to find educational examples. Our university recently created a novel introductory robotics course which the leadership at the partner high school saw as an attractive model for an 11th grade engineering course. To help create the high school engineering course, we facilitated participatory design sessions with various educational stakeholders who had varying visions for the course; these stakeholders included high school teachers, university faculty, educational researchers, and undergraduate students who had previously taken the university robotics course. In this paper, the authors explore the ways in which ideas from the participatory design sessions shaped the first iteration of the engineering course. A design challenge the authors faced was incorporating the stakeholders’ competing and sometimes contradictory visions for the course into instructional materials. In this paper, we present these methods of integration as a model for others seeking to adapt university engineering courses for a high school context.

Computing education practitioners and researchers know a lot about how to design courses for students who are going to pursue a career in computing (e.g., professional software developer, data scientist, or computer engineer). Today, computing is a necessary part of other careers, such as scientists who create computational models and simulations, artists working in computational media, and critical computing scholars. The University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) charged a task force with defining the computing education needs for their students. The task force conducted a year long process involving searches of courses and programs, interviews with students and faculty, and a large survey. The task force proposed themes of Computing for Discovery, Expression, and Justice as useful in organizing computing within the liberal arts and sciences. We are now designing the introductory courses for expression and justice. We are using participatory design methods where faculty advisors engage in tasks (like card sorting) to define projects and learning goals. The expression and justice card sorts are markedly different. We are planning to use a block-based language (Snap!) for instruction and homework, but students will also engage with a purpose-built Runestone ebook in a textual language like Processing (for expression), and Python and HTML (for justice). The ebook activities are informed by purpose-first programming in order to support transfer of knowledge and to encourage a sense of self-efficacy and authenticity.

In 2016, President Obama declared a goal of "CS for All." In the intervening years, we have seen the percentage of high schools offering computer science increase. The 2021 "CS for CA" report says that 46% of California high schools now offer computer science. However, in few states do more than 10% of the high schools take computer science classes. Only 5% of California's 1.93 million high school students take any computer science. We now know that the "All" are unlikely to ever take a "CS" class. If we want more students to experience and learn about CS, we may have to take the "CS" to where the "All" are. Task-specific programming (TSP) languages are designed to be highly usable, rapidly learned (less than 10 minutes, typically), and matched specifically to learning activities that non-CS teachers want in their classrooms. These are "Teaspoon languages" (playing off the TSP abbreviation), because they add a teaspoon of computing into other subjects. We have developed prototype Teaspoon languages now for social studies, language arts, and mathematics classes. This approach is novel for involving non-CS teachers in designing new languages with a high degree of usability. We should be talking to non-CS teachers about what they might want with computing, building prototype tools for them, and expecting withering criticism. That's how we'll learn to build CS that works for All.

Conversational programmers want to learn about code primarily to communicate with technical co-workers, not to develop software. However, existing instructional materials don’t meet the needs of conversational programmers because they prioritize syntax and semantics over concepts and applications. This mismatch results in feelings of failure and low self-efficacy. To motivate conversational programmers, we propose purpose-first programming, a new approach that focuses on learning a handful of domain-specific code patterns and assembling them to create authentic and useful programs. We report on the development of a purpose-first programming prototype that teaches five patterns in the domain of web scraping. We show that learning with purpose-first programming is motivating for conversational programmers because it engenders a feeling of success and aligns with these learners’ goals. Purpose-first programming learning enabled novice conversational programmers to complete scaffolded code writing, debugging, and explaining activities after only 30 minutes of instruction.

Validated instruments of knowledge are important for creating an accepted and shared measurement for the most important part of education – student learning. The Force Concept of Inventory from Physics Education Research has had a significant impact across STEM education. The Foundational CS1 (FCS1) and Second CS1 (SCS1) assessments were created and validated to further computing education research. Now, ten years after the publication of the FCS1 assessment and five years after the release of the SCS1 assessment, we can trace the use and the impact that these validated instruments have had on the needs and knowledge of the computing education community. In this paper, we examine how the FCS1 and SCS1 assessments have been used and adapted. We use this discussion to guide a comparison between our field and physics education to give a sense of direction to future research. In looking back on the use of these validated instruments, we can better understand our needs in computing education research and about our future needs in assessment.

Summary form only given, as follows. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. The inventors of the term “computer science” meant for it to be something that was taught to everyone, to facilitate learning other subjects and to help people understand the risks of technology in their lives. The potential benefits of computing education and the risks are even greater than they predicted, but few participate in computing education. Only a privileged class understands and creates a critical part of our world. If we wanted to reach the original and more general goal, we would have to change how we teach computing — and maybe even change computing. In this talk, I review the history of “computer science” and its earlier purpose, consider the barriers to reaching universal computational literacy, then describe and demonstrate new kinds of languages, tools, and approaches for learning and teaching computing for everyone.

This research full paper presents front-end design activity with social studies pre-service teachers to inform the design of data visualization technology tools. Data visualizations are powerful tools that social studies teachers use to explore the narratives they want their students to learn. They can serve as evidence for historical arguments and prompts that start students on a path of inquiry. The ability to analyze, interpret, evaluate, and use data and data visualizations - known as data literacy - has become an increasingly important component of K-12 social studies education in recent years.While there are many technological innovations that have been developed to support engineering education in K-12 classrooms, adoption of these tools has been low. Our hypothesis is that adoption may improve if teachers are involved in the front-end design process of technology intended for use in their classrooms. This work describes the results of two Participatory Design (PD) sessions about data visualization with pre-service social studies teachers.In our design sessions, thirty-two pre-service teachers evaluated programming and non-programming data visualization experiences, and then told us what they would like in future data visualization tools. The Minimal Manual was used as a guide in the design of the activity sheets to scaffold use of the tools. After each PD session, we used conjecture mapping to process and analyze the data.Although there were minor design differences in the two PD sessions, the pre-service teachers' evaluations were surprisingly different from one another. These results suggest that PD sessions might be highly idiosyncratic, and we cannot reliably generalize from just a single PD session. We found that secondary focused pre-service teachers tended to be more interested in the data visualization tools than elementary focused pre-service teachers. Further sessions and analysis are necessary to make more reliable conclusions about the characteristics pre-service social studies teachers would like to see in a pedagogical tool they would consider adopting in their classroom. Our work informs other researchers who are considering PD for developing K-12 education interventions.

The 32 chapters of the 2019 Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research synthesize the existing research in computing education and propose new directions for future research. An author from each chapter will summarize their chapter with auto-advancing slides. Attendees will be introduced to the breadth of content in the new handbook and can identify chapters of interest. This fits uniquely as a special session, and will likely be informative, inspiring, and overwhelming.

Typical CS 1 classes are about many things. The problems and examples are drawn from a variety of domains, with a goal of teaching a computational problem-solving approach and specific language constructs. Many CS 1 courses begin with writing programs that perform simple calculations, transition to more substantial simulations or games in the middle, and perhaps one or two SIGCSE Nifty Assignments at the end. In this panel, we explore the 'strongly-themed' approach in which many of the programs and examples used in the course come from a single domain which provides a theme for the course.

Social studies educators often use stories to convey historical changes over time. Data visualizations are powerful tools that can help illustrate and investigate these stories and the questions surrounding them. The ability to analyze, interpret, evaluate, and use data and data visualizations - known as data literacy - has become an increasingly important component of K-12 social studies education in recent years. In an effort to improve data literacy, teachers see a role for computer science in social studies education.

An estimated 35% of high school principals across the U.S. report teaching computer science (CS) at their schools, according to a 2018 code.org access report. Meanwhile, a growing number of organizations have missions of providing computer science to all students in primary and secondary schools. In order to reach all students with CS, we need to understand the choices students, teachers, and schools make regarding accessing CS education. In this poster, we present a regression model that predicts the percentage of students enrolled in a computer science course at a public high school in the U.S. state of Georgia.We choose a single state because the US school system is highly-distributed, so policy and standards contexts differ between states. Using publicly available data sets, we explore what could advance or diminish a school's choice to offer a CS course. Our results show that the explanatory variable that mostly highly correlates with and most strongly influences CS being offered in a school is whether CS has been offered before. The implication is that startup costs and inertia may be among the most critical factors, as opposed to wealth or size of the school district. Median income at the county level and enrollment numbers at a school do affect CS enrollment numbers, but only explain a small amount of the variance. We are currently undertaking qualitative work to understand the idiosyncratic factors that influence schools' decision to offer a CS course.

Prior research has shown that sketching out a code trace on paper is correlated with higher scores on code reading problems. Why do students sometimes choose not to draw out a code trace, or if they do, choose a different sketching technique than their instructor has demonstrated? In this study, we interviewed 13 CS1 students retrospectively about their decisions to sketch and draw on a recent programming exam. When students do sketch, we find that their sketching choices do not always align with a strict execution of the notional machine. Sketching choices are driven by a search for a program's patterns, an attempt to create organizational structure among intermediate values, and the tracking of prior steps and results. When novices don't sketch, they often report that they've identified the goal that the code achieves. In either case, novices are searching for the functionality of code, rather than merely tracing its behavior.

Modern learning theories emphasize the critical social aspect of learning. Computer science (CS) classrooms often have "defensive climates'' that inhibit social learning and prevent the development of a community of learners. We believe that we can improve the social context of computer science learning by expanding CS learning beyond the single student in front of a display screen. Our theory is that the single student and single display inhibits collaboration and collaborative awareness of student work. In this paper, we present two case studies where we explored ways to make student work visible to peers. The first case study involved using a studio model for learning enabled by projection-based Augmented Reality (AR), and the second case study involves using a maker-oriented curriculum to make student work visible. Findings suggest the visibility of student work in CS classrooms helped support a community of learners: students collaborated, used each other as sources of inspiration, and felt more comfortable asking for help.

Teaching programming as a way to express ideas, communicate with others, and understand our world is one of the oldest goals for computing education. The inventor of the term "computer science" saw it as the third leg of STEM literacy. In this talk, I lay out the history of the idea of universal computational literacy, some of what it will take to get there, and how our field will be different when we do.

As we celebrate the 50th SIGCSE Symposium, this panel explores how computing education researchers chart a course individually and as a community to build our research practices and collective knowledge of computing education. This navigation involves developing our research goals, which tools we use to work towards those goals, and which academic communities outside of computing education we seek to learn from and contribute to. However, these processes of navigation are rarely discussed as a community. Paper and grant submissions and reviews provide an imperfect way for our community to communicate our varied values and priorities. This panel brings together experts in computing education research who differ in their research goals, tools, and external communities. We can expect a lively discussion amongst the panelist and we hope to spark important discussions within the computing education research community!

Efforts to improve and promote CS education characterized by greater participation of underrepresented groups have taken off sharply in the six years since the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) NSF alliance was first funded. Though many of these initiatives are occurring at the student and teacher level, ECEP and other national-level organizations have demonstrated the importance of focusing on change at the state level, as this can have important, long-term implications on policy and infrastructure. This poster describes ECEP's emergent design as a backbone organization helping state-level teams achieve educational change around CS. It also highlights key lessons learned through the alliance about how to foster CS education change at the state level. Four key lessons stand out. 1) The importance of understanding that engaging states requires appreciating the commonality of a framework around key areas to change (such as state standards, teacher certification and graduation requirements) but also respecting the uniqueness of state circumstances in these change areas. 2) The shared value created through a collective impact model to build a community that can support rich discussion and sharing of ideas. 3) The utility of an empirically derived a 4-stage model of state change used by ECEP that emphasized defining leaders, understanding the CS education landscape and finding allies to support efforts. and 4) The role of state team structures that can facilitate change when they are guided by identifying and engaging key stakeholders within a state and giving them a voice in driving the strategies and plans.

Socioeconomic status (SES) has a measurable impact on many educational outcomes and likely also influences computer science (CS) achievement. We present a novel model to account for the observed connections between SES and CS achievement. We examined possible mediating variables between SES and CS achievement, including spatial ability and access to computing. We define access as comprised of measurements of prior learning opportunities for computing, perceptions of computer science, and encouragement to pursue computing. The factors (SES, spatial ability, access to computing, and CS achievement) were measured through surveys completed by 163 students in introductory computing courses at a college level. Through the use of exploratory structural equation modeling, we found that these variables do impact each other, though not as we originally hypothesized. For our sample of students, we found spatial ability was a mediating variable for SES and CS achievement, but access to computing was not. Neither model explained all the variance, and our subject pool of US college students had higher than average SES. Our findings suggest that SES does influence success in computer science, but that relationship may not be due to access to computing education opportunities. Rather, SES might be influencing variables such as spatial ability which in turn influence CS performance.

Gestures, or spontaneous hand movements produced when talking, are an untapped resource for understanding student knowledge in computing education. This paper develops a conceptual framework to support future studies of learning and teaching that incorporate gesture studies in programming contexts. In particular, this paper introduces how gesture has been used to study teaching and learning in another discipline, mathematics; critically reviews and interprets what concepts and methods may be most relevant to programming contexts; and also discusses what unique challenges programming contexts present to studies of gesture (e.g. differences in abstract versus concrete). We ground our understandings of gesture by using an observational study where we observed novice students learning to program. This paper concludes by suggesting potential avenues for future research in computing education that incorporate analyses of gesture in studies of teaching and learning.

Computer science teachers want to know what their students are and are not learning and understanding. Gestures, or spontaneous hand movements produced when talking, could help teachers understand what their students are thinking. During communication, gestures often reflect thoughts not expressed when people talk (Goldin-Meadow & Wagner, 2005). Listeners can then extract meaningful information from the gestures they see. When learning computer science, gestures may be an external representation of students' understandings of code. In this research, we conducted a qualitative study observing and interviewing a high school CS class to understand how and when gestures were used. When students trace code, their gestures show how well they understand the code's execution. In another context when students described their code to the teacher or other students, the students' gestures showed how abstracted their knowledge was. Students who understood their code made more general gestures, while struggling students made pointing gestures for each line of their code. These findings suggest that teachers could use students' gestures as a formative assessment to understand how well their students are learning.

Sketching out a code trace is a cognitive assistance for programmers, student and professional. Previous research (Lister et al. 2004) showed that students who sketch a trace on paper had greater success on code 'reading' problems involving loops, arrays, and conditionals. We replicated this finding, and developed further categories of student sketching strategies. Our results support previous findings that students who don't sketch on code reading problems have a lower success rate than students who do sketch. We found that students who sketch incomplete traces also have a low success rate, similar to students who don't sketch at all. We categorized sketching strategies on new problem types (code writing, code ordering, and code fixing) and find that different types of sketching are used on these problems, not always with increased success. We ground our results in a theory of sketching as a method for distributing cognition and as a demonstration of the process of the notional machine.

Online education is an important tool for supporting the growing number of teachers and students in computer science. We created two eBooks containing interactive content for Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles, one targeted at teachers and one at students. By comparing the eBook usage patterns of these populations, including activity usage counts, transitions between activities, and pathways through the eBook, we develop a characterization of how student use of the eBook differs from teacher use. We offer design recommendations for how eBooks might be developed to target each of our populations. We ground our recommendations in a theory of teachers as expert learners who possess a greater ability to regulate their own learning process.

In January 2016, US President Barack Obama started an initiative to provide CS for All -- with the goal that all school students should have access to computing education. Computing departments in higher education have a particularly important role to play in this initiative. It's in our best interest to get involved, since the effort can potentially improve the quality of our incoming students. CS Departments have unique insights as subject-matter experts to inform the development of standards. We can provide leadership to inform and influence education policy. In this session, we will present a variety of ways in which departments and faculty can support CS for All and will answer audience questions about the initiative. Our goal is to provide concrete positive actions for faculty.

In this workshop participants will receive an overview of teaching practices in computer science that research indicates are effective. While the field of computer science education is young, it has uncovered several teaching practices that can be adopted by instructors that can improve both the retention and performance of students. These evidence based teaching practices include active learning techniques such as peer instruction and prior-knowledge activities, pair programming, and use of subgoal labels. Participants will experience firsthand many of these techniques and will be provided with resources on where to find more information, including the original research papers, on each technique. If you want to attend a workshop that will have an immediate impact in your class -- attend this one. The workshop will be interactive, engaging, and show you how to incorporate teaching practices that are empirically proven to provide benefits. You are guaranteed to leave with a list of many freely available resources and ideas to use in your next class. You will also have the opportunity to "ask the experts" as the authors of many of these research papers will be leading that session of the workshop.

Several countries are trying to provide access to computing education for all secondary students. However, there are not enough teachers who are prepared to teach computer science. Interactive electronic books (ebooks) are a promising approach for providing low-cost professional development in computer science. Over the last four years, our research group has been conducting design-based research by iteratively developing and testing versions of a teacher ebook to help secondary teachers with no programming experience learn to teach an introductory programming course. The interactive elements in the ebook were designed based on research results from educational psychology and are intended to make learning more efficient and effective. Our goals for this effort are to increase teachers' knowledge of computer science concepts and to improve teachers' confidence in their ability to teach computer science. In this paper we summarize our previous work and report on a large-scale study of version two of the teacher ebook. We also recommend several design principles for interactive ebooks for computing teachers based on feedback from teachers, log file analyses, and randomized controlled studies.

Computing education lags other discipline-based education research in the number and range of validated assessments available to the research community. Validated assessments are important for researchers to reduce experimental error due to flawed assessments and to allow for comparisons between different experiments. Although the need is great, building assessments from scratch is difficult. Once an assessment is built, it's important to be able to replicate it, in order to address problems within it, or to extend it. We developed the Second CS1 Assessment (SCS1) as an isomorphic version of a previously validated language-independent assessment for introductory computer science, the FCS1. Replicating the FCS1 is important to enable free use by a broader research community. This paper is documentation of our process for replicating an existing validated assessment and validating the success of our replication. We present initial use of SCS1 by other research groups, to serve as examples of where it might be used in the future. SCS1 is useful for researchers, but care must be taken to avoid undermining the validity argument.

We report on a study that used subgoal labels to teach students how to write while loops with a Parsons problem learning assessment. Subgoal labels were used to aid learning of programming while not overloading students' cognitive abilities. We wanted to compare giving learners subgoal labels versus asking learners to generate subgoal labels. As an assessment for learning we asked students to solve a Parsons problem -- to place code segments in the correct order. We found that students who were given subgoal labels performed statistically better than the groups that did not receive subgoal labels or were asked to generate subgoal labels. We conclude that a low cognitive load assessment, Parsons problems, can be more sensitive to student learning gains than traditional code generation problems.

Validated assessments are important for teachers and researchers. A validated assessment is carefully developed to make sure that it is measuring the right things. Computing education needs more and better validated assessments. Validated assessments provide instructors with insight on how their students are doing in their class and provide researchers with insight on whether certain technologies and interventions are successful. Building high-quality, validated assessments is difficult. However, it is possible to replicate an existing validated assessment, and the new assessment can be validated against the original assessment. We need mechanisms to replicate assessments so that we can build more and more varied assessments for different audiences. We developed the Secondary CS1 Assessment (SCS1) as an isomorphic version of a previously validated assessment instrument for introductory computer science. In this poster we provide an overview for the process of replicating an existing valid knowledge assessment and validating the replication. Handouts will be provided with information about how to access and use the SCS1 Assessment.

The goal of this project is to use projection augmented reality to add design studio learning models to a classroom for an introductory Media Computation computer science class. Students do classwork using an enhanced version of Pythy, a web IDE for Python and Jython, that captures students' work and displays it around the room. We leverage the Microsoft RoomAlive Toolkit to construct a room-scale augmented reality using pairs of projectors and depth cameras. The system “pins” students' work to the walls, where teachers and students can see and discuss the work. We hope that by seeing each other's work, the system will foster collaboration and support the creation of STEM learning experiences that encourage creativity, innovation, and help build strong peer learning environments.

Educational psychology findings indicate that active processing (such as self-testing) is more effective for learning than passive reading or even rereading. Electronic books (ebooks) can include much more than static pictures and text. Ebooks can promote better learning by increasing the reader's interaction with the material through multi-modal learning supports, worked examples, and low cognitive load practice activities. For example, multiple choice questions with immediate feedback can help identify misconceptions and gaps in knowledge. Parsons problems, which are mixed up code segments that have to be put in the correct order, require learners to think about the order of the statements in a solution without having to worry about syntax errors. Our research group has been applying concepts from educational psychology to make learning from ebooks more effective and efficient. This paper reports on an observational study and log file analysis on the use of an ebook that incorporates interactive activities. We provide evidence that learners engaged in the interactive activities, but used some types of activities more than others. We also found evidence that learners encountered some "desirable difficulties" which can improve learning. This descriptive study informs a research agenda to improve the quality of instruction in computing education.

Recent empirical results suggest that the instructional material used to teach computing may actually overload students' cognitive abilities. Better designed materials may enhance learning by reducing unnecessary load. Subgoal labels have been shown to be effective at reducing the cognitive load during problem solving in both mathematics and science. Until now, subgoal labels have been given to students to learn passively. We report on a study to determine if giving learners subgoal labels is more or less effective than asking learners to generate subgoal labels within an introductory CS programming task. The answers are mixed and depend on other features of the instructional materials. We found that student performance gains did not replicate as expected in the introductory CS task for those who were given subgoal labels. Computer science may require different kinds of problem-solving or may generate different cognitive demands than mathematics or science.

We are all excited to see an increasing number of national efforts to reform computing education. Persistent and sustainable change in a state, its higher education institutions, and its K12 districts requires the active participation of individuals and local organizations to engage policy makers, higher education, school districts and communities. U.S. education is highly distributed, with critical decisions pushed more to the community level and less at the national (or even state) level. The system is organized along K20 pathways and a reform process to improve these pathways will take place at multiple levels and state by state.

No abstract available.

Summary form only given. We share a vision of a society that is able to express problems and ideas computationally. Andrea diSessa called that computational literacy, and he invented the Boxer Programming Environment to explore the media of computational literacy. Education has the job of making citizens literate. Education systems around the world are exploring the question of what should all citizens know about computing and how do we provide that knowledge. The questions being asked are about public policy, but also about what does it mean to be expressive with computation and what should computing users know. The answers to these questions have implications for the future of human-centric computing.

A student's capacity to learn a concept is directly related to how much cognitive load is used to comprehend the material. The central problem identified by Cognitive Load Theory is that learning is impaired when the total amount of processing requirements exceeds the limited capacity of working memory. Instruction can impose three different types of cognitive load on a student's working memory: intrinsic load, extraneous load, and germane load. Since working memory is a fixed size, instructional material should be designed to minimize the extraneous and intrinsic loads in order to increase the amount of memory available for the germane load. This will improve learning. To effectively design instruction to minimize cognitive load we must be able to measure the specific load components for any pedagogical intervention. This paper reports on a study that adapts a previously developed instrument to measure cognitive load. We report on the adaptation of the instrument to a new discipline, introductory computer science, and the results of measuring the cognitive load factors of specific lectures. We discuss the implications for the ability to measure specific cognitive load components and use of the tool in future studies.

We examine the current state of computing education in the United States, in order to be able to identify problems in diversity and performance. Data on computing education are difficult to come by, since computer science courses are not tracked in US public education systems. By using a large and nationwide quantitative data source, we can gain new insights into who is participating in computing education, where the greatest need is, and what factors explain the variance between states. We used data from the Advanced Placement Computer Science A (AP CS A) exam to get a detailed view of the demographics of who is taking the exam across the United States and in each state, and how they are performing on the exam. We use economic and census data to provide explanations for some of the AP CS data. We find that minority group involvement is low in AP CS A, but the variance between states in terms of exam-takers is driven by minority group involvement. We find that wealth in a state influences the number of students taking the AP CS A exam, but indirectly.

Georgia Computes! ( GaComputes ) was a six-year (2006--2012) project to improve computing education across the state of Georgia in the United States, funded by the National Science Foundation. The goal of GaComputes was to broaden participation in computing and especially to engage more members of underrepresented groups which includes women, African Americans, and Hispanics. GaComputes’ interventions were multi-faceted and broad: summer camps and after-school/weekend programs for 4th--12th grade students, professional development for secondary teachers, and professional development for post-secondary instructors faculty. All of the efforts were carefully evaluated by an external team (led by the third and fourth authors), which provides us with an unusually detailed view into a computing education intervention across a region (about 59K square miles, about 9.9 million residents). Our dataset includes evaluations from over 2,000 students who attended after-school or weekend workshops, over 500 secondary school teachers who attended professional development, 120 post-secondary teachers who attended professional development, and over 2,000 students who attended a summer day (non-residential) camp. GaComputes evaluations provide insight into details of interventions and into influences on student motivation and learning. In this article, we describe the results of these evaluations and describe how GaComputes broadened participation in computing in Georgia through both direct interventions and indirect support of other projects.

Research in computing education has been criticized as "Marco Polo," e.g., the researchers tried something and reported what happened. Our developing field needs more hypothesis-driven and theory-driven research. We will get there by making clear our goals and hypotheses, testing those goals and hypotheses explicitly, and critically reconsidering our results. My colleagues and I designed and evaluated a media-centric introductory computing approach ("Media Computation") over the last ten years. We started from a "Marco Polo" style and an explicit set of hypotheses. We have worked to test those hypotheses and to understand the outcomes. Our iterative effort has led us to explore deeper theory around motivation and learning. This paper serves as an example of a ten year research program that resulted in more hypotheses, a more elaborated theory, and a better understanding of the potential impacts of a computer science curriculum change.

We report on the implementation and evaluation of a three-year program to increase interest in studying computer science (CS) among African American male high school students. Over the course of 3 years, the Glitch Game Tester (Glitch) program employed 25 African American male high school students. These students tested pre-release digital games, full-time in the summer and part-time in the school year, with an hour of each day dedicated to learning introductory CS. Initially, only 20% of our participants expressed interest in pursing computing as a career. After Glitch, 65% have pursued some form of post-secondary computing studies. These outcomes, and the participants' enthusiasm for engaging in computing, are in sharp contrast to the crisis in African American male education and learning motivation. The research presented in this report discusses lessons learned through implementation of the Glitch program and higher education outcomes after graduation from the program.

This session will present the research findings to date from an 18-month study commissioned by the ACM in partnership with the National Science Foundation, Google, Computer Science Teachers Association, Microsoft, and the National Center for Woman and Information Technology that started in July, 2012, and invite an open discussion about them. The study seeks to understand the national landscape of K-12 computer science (CS) professional development (PD) and the capacity to provide high quality CS PD on a large scale. The study is being conducted by The University of Chicago's Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education (CEMSE) who will present findings from the landscape study conducted in the Summer and Fall of 2012, as well as preliminary findings about the CS community's capacity for increasing the ranks of K-12 CS teachers in light NSF's stated goal of preparing 10,000 secondary education teachers to teach high-quality computer science[1].

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.

Every time I re-use a handout, I look it over and make a few little "improvements". I play around with code demos and entertain myself with different slide transitions. However, inevitably, I return to the conclusion that most of what my students learn in my course comes from the assignments. Great assignments are hard to dream up and time-consuming to develop. With that in mind, the Nifty Assignments session is all about promoting and sharing the ideas and ready-to-use materials of successful assignments.

No abstract available.

In the summer of 2011, we revamped the curriculum for the GLITCH Game Testers research project to better serve the interests of the 15 student participants. Our new curriculum, based on Greenfoot and game development, replaced an earlier curriculum that students felt was inauthentic. Through Greenfoot, the new curriculum had the benefits of authenticity, easy access to concepts that were relevant to the students, and immediate visual feedback, and these qualities helped align students' perceptions with their actual abilities to program based on what they had learned. We analyze students' reported abilities and their demonstrated abilities and show how the two align, and we suggest long-term implications for maintaining that alignment.

In computing education, we have only just started developing methods for accurately measuring a student's understanding of introductory computing, let alone characterizing a whole classroom, school, or university system. As part of evaluating the impact of "Georgia Computes!" we sought an understanding the factors influencing undergraduate enrollment in introductory computing for an entire state in the United States of America. We gathered surveys from over 1400 undergraduate students in introductory computing classes from 19 higher-education institutions in a single state. The analysis provided insight into the impact of "Georgia Computes!", into the connections between stages of the computing education pathways, and how factors that influence students' pursuit of computing differ between genders and majority/minority group students.

Mental models are mental representations of how an action changes a problem state. Creating a mental model early in the learning process is a strong predictor of success in computer science classes. One major problem in computer science education, however, is that novices have difficulty creating mental models perhaps because of the cognitive overload caused by traditional teaching methods. The present study employed subgoal-labeled instructional materials to promote the creation of mental models when teaching novices to program in Android App Inventor. Utilizing this and other well-established educational tools, such as scaffolding, to reduce cognitive load in computer science education improved the performance of participants on novel tasks when learning to develop mobile applications.

The Disciplinary Commons (DC) is a model of teacher professional development that encourages members of the group to reflect upon their teaching practices, develop a community, and, more broadly, to become more scholarly about their teaching. The DC involves a series of monthly meetings where university faculty members examine their course in detail while producing a course portfolio. Evaluation of the early DC's suggests that they successfully created a sense of community and sharing among the participants. We have adapted the original model to a new audience, high school computing teachers. The adapted model maintains the key aspects of the original model while adding two new, important goals for this new audience: improving recruitment and creating community. The high school teacher audience particularly needed strategies for recruiting students and was in greater need of community. We present evaluation evidence suggesting that we achieved the design goals in a replicable model, including a substantial increase (over 300%) in recruiting students.

Everybody teaches linked lists, with homework like implementing duplicate, weave, and reverse. When those nodes contain strings or numbers, these are pretty boring assignments. When these nodes contain music (MIDI), these operations are composing music, which can then be played. This workshop shows how to use music, images, and sounds to teach the basic data structures, including linked lists, circular linked lists, stacks, queues, and trees. These pieces can then be tied together through the use of simulations to generate animated movies. We will be using Java, though many of the methods can also be used in Python.

Quality computer science (CS) teachers are critical for secondary computing education. In addition to increasing the number of high school (HS) CS teachers, there is a great need for supporting those teachers to grow and stay as committed, effective teachers. Recent literature on teacher education suggests that teachers' sense of commitment and (other aspects of) teaching profession is tightly linked with their teacher identity. However, the current educational system in the U.S. does not provide typical contexts for teachers to build a sense of identity as CS teachers. This study is intended to gain an initial understanding of CS teachers' perceptions about their own professional identity and potential factors that might contribute to these perceptions. Our findings indicate that current HS teachers teaching CS courses do not necessarily identify themselves as CS teachers. They have different perceptions related to CS teaching. Four kinds of factors can contribute to these perceptions: teachers' educational background and certification, CS curriculum and department hierarchy, availability of CS teacher community, and teachers' perceptions about the field of CS.

We present the results of an interview study investigating student experiences in two online introductory computer science courses. Our theoretical approach is situated at the intersection of two research traditions: distance and adult education research , which tends to be sociologically oriented, and computer science education research , which has strong connections with pedagogy and psychology. The article reviews contributions from both traditions on student failure in the context of higher education, distance and online education as well as introductory computer science. Our research relies on a combination of the two perspectives, which provides useful results for the field of computer science education in general, as well as its online or distance versions. The interviewed students exhibited great diversity in both socio-demographic and educational background. We identified no profiles that predicted student success or failure. At the same time, we found that expectations about programming resulted in challenges of time-management and communication. The time requirements of programming assignments were unpredictable, often disproportionate to expectations, and clashed with the external commitments of adult professionals. Too little communication was available to access adequate instructor help. On the basis of these findings, we suggest instructional design solutions for adult professionals studying introductory computer science education.

Many young African American males have a passion for video games, but they don't often translate that passion into learning about computing. Part of the problem is that they do not identify with computing as a social norm within their peer group. This disidentification with computing can negatively impact academic performance and limit opportunities for upward mobility. We developed a job training program called Glitch Game Testers in which young African American men are trained to 'Sbreak open the black box' of their game consoles to learn about computing. Perceptions of peers' technical competency were measured before and after the summer 2010 program. Results showed that participants were more likely to view their peers as technical resources and their overall access to technical resources increased. Broader implications for motivating technology adoption in HCI are discussed.

As CS becomes a larger field, many undergraduate programs are giving students greater freedom in the classes that make up their degree. This study looks at the process by which students within the CS major choose to specialize in some area. In this study we interviewed student advisors, graduated CS students, and students currently in the undergraduate process about their view of CS and how they make decisions. The interviews were analyzed with grounded theory approach. The analysis presents four forces that affect student decision making. One, students often use the amount they enjoy individual classes as a sign of how well they fit with a particular specialization. Two, students often do not research, so they select specializations based on misconceptions. Three, students often rely on the curriculum to protect against poor educational choices. Four, students usually do not have a personal vision for what they hope to do with a Computer Science degree.

The motivated student is easy to teach. You facilitate learning and get out of the way. It's much more challenging to teach the student who is less motivated, or who needs knowledge to support their main interest. Think of the graphics designer who chooses to learn scripting to make their job easier, but doesn't want to learn to "program" and whose many (simple) mistakes cost valuable time. Think of the secondary-school business teacher who wants to teach computer science, but who doesn't want to learn to be a professional programmer. The number of people who need some knowledge of a domain may be much greater than those who need expertise in that domain. Providing learning opportunities tailored to the needs and interests of the learner, potentially motivating that interest where necessary, is a great and important challenge in an increasingly technological society. My talk will describe characteristics of these challenges and suggest where computing technologies and computing education research insights may provide solutions.

This paper explores the issue of what kind of evidence triggers changes in the teaching practice of Computer Science educators, and how educators evaluate the effectiveness of those changes. We interviewed 14 Computer Science instructors from three different institutions. Our study indicates that changes are mostly initiated from instructors' intuition, informal discussion with students, and anecdotal evidence.

In this paper, we describe our experience in supporting high school CS teachers by building a local community through the Disciplinary Commons for Computing Educators (DCCE) project. The DCCE project is an effort to explore ways of supporting these CS teachers through the creation of a local community and by promoting teacher reflection. DCCE achieved this goal through an academic-year-long program where a cohort of CS teachers engaged in collaborative portfolio creation and peer observation of classroom teaching. We describe the design of the DCCE activities and present preliminary results from initial evaluations. Our short-term evaluations indicate that this project was successful in creating a supportive community, promoting teacher reflection, and advancing change in teaching practices among a group of computing educators.

Following a roughly 10 year cycle, the Computing Curricula volumes have helped to set international curricular guidelines for undergraduate programs in computing. In the summer of 2010, planning for the next volume in the series, Computer Science 2013, began. This panel seeks to update and engage the SIGCSE community on the Computer Science 2013 effort. The development of curricular guidelines in Computer Science is particularly challenging given the rapid evolution and expansion of the field. Moreover, the growing diversity of topics in Computer Science and the integration of computing with other disciplines create additional challenges and opportunities in defining computing curricula. As a result, it is particularly important to engage the broader computer science education community in a dialog to better understand new opportunities, local needs, and novel successful models of computing curriculum. The last complete Computer Science curricular volume was released in 2001 [3] and followed by a review effort that concluded in 2008 [2]. While the review helped to update some of the knowledge units in the 2001 volume, it was not aimed at producing an entirely new curricular volume and deferred some of the more significant questions that arose at the time. The Computer Science 2013 effort seeks to provide a new volume reflecting the current state of the field and highlighting promising future directions through revisiting and redefining the knowledge units in CS, rethinking the essentials necessary for a CS curriculum, and identifying working exemplars of courses and curricula along these lines.

A primary goal of many CS education projects is to determine the extent to which a given intervention has had an impact on student learning. However, computing lacks valid assessments for pedagogical or research purposes. Without such valid assessments, it is difficult to accurately measure student learning or establish a relationship between the instructional setting and learning outcomes.

In this special session, we will discuss the role and value of quantitative instruments in gauging student perspectives in computer science education. After creating the appropriate context, we will discuss the road educators have traveled in creating such instruments as well as review one based on a variation of a survey developed by the University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group. Finally, we will present the importance of gathering this information from the perspective of grant agencies. During our conversation, we will invite our audience members to fill out the survey form for a particular instrument. If we are collectively on the same page, then our responses may be used to establish a baseline to which students progress can be compared.

This paper reports on a study of professional web designers and developers. We provide a detailed characterization of their knowledge of fundamental programming concepts elicited through card sorting. Additionally, we present qualitative findings regarding their motivation to learn new concepts and the learning strategies they employ. We find a high level of recognition of basic concepts, but we identify a number of concepts that they do not fully understand, consider difficult to learn, and use infrequently. We also note that their learning process is motivated by work projects and often follows a pattern of trial and error. We conclude with implications for end-user programming researchers.

This paper presents findings of an exploratory, qualitative study of professional web and graphic designers who regularly write computer programs. These participants have a wide variety of educational backgrounds, including some who had a few classes in computer science. Our participants report having found a career in which they enjoy being both creative and technical. They want to learn more about computing, but do not find computing curricula as meeting their needs. We discuss their perceptions of the computing discipline, motivational aspects of their jobs, and their interest in learning more about computing. We also consider implications for computing curricula if we were to try to meet the needs of these professionals who are unlikely to appear in our current classes.

No abstract available.

The SIGCSE community has been exploring the role of multimedia to enhance computing education since the earliest algorithm visualization systems and studies [1]. Media Computation is a shift in focus [2]. Where algorithm visualization presents information to the student to facilitate their understanding, media computation is about having students manipulate media as the data for their programming, i.e., as the focus of the course activities. Students in media computation produce new images, sounds, and video. We aim to show that computer science is about more than numbers and strings. Computer science is also about creative expression. The original media computation work focused on using media to motivate non-computing majors [2]. The role of media in motivating student learning for computing education has broadened. Inventive teachers are using media computation for lots of different kinds of students, at different kinds of institutions, with a range of languages and toolkits. This special session is a mixture of "Five Minute Madness," science fair, and art gallery. Each participant will present how he or she is using media to motivate student learning, and some student work will be available for audience inspection

Video game development is an attractive career objective for many computer science students. Colleges are starting degree programs and specializations to serve this interest, but faculty may not have an informed idea of what game programming is like or how to advise students interested in the field. This paper describes the results of interviews with developers, managers, and artists at one company to determine what qualifications were most significant when evaluating college hires for jobs in game development. The qualifications we elicited formed the basis of a company-wide survey.

This special session is devoted to identifying the CS education papers of the 20th century that have had the greatest influence on our practice of CS education today. The point is not primarily to produce the list of papers; rather it is to derive criteria, principles, and practices for identifying valuable contributions to CS education. This will provide a basis for establishing of awards or other recognition for influential contributions to CS education; it may also clarify the criteria for reviewing all papers. Invited participants will identify influential papers and their criteria for selecting them; the audience will also be encouraged to nominate papers and propose selection criteria. The results of this session will be communicated to the SIGCSE leadership, who will decide whether, and how, to implement any actual awards.

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory, qualitative study revealing computing instructors' experience in adopting curriculum innovations. We interviewed eight instructors a year after they attended workshops on several innovative introductory Computer Science (intro CS) courses at undergraduate level. The interview was designed to elicit the extent to which instructors had adopted or adapted what they learned from the workshops, and what drove or prevented their efforts to make curriculum change. The results of this study reveal that the adoption and adaptation of computing curriculum innovations in new situations may involve systemic change affecting instructors, departments and institutions as a whole. The findings of this study suggest a list of questions that a computing instructor might ask before committing to a new innovation. We also consider implications of this study for disseminating computing education innovations.

Previous studies of student programming ability have raised questions about students' ability to problem solve, read and analyze code, and understand introductory computing concepts. However, it is unclear whether these results are the product of failures of student comprehension or our inability to accurately measure their performance. We propose a method for creating a language independent CS1 assessment instrument and present the results of our analysis used to define the common conceptual content that will serve as the framework for the exam. We conclude with a discussion of future work and our progress towards developing the assessment.

Computing educators may hope that postsecondary courses both convey content and also give students a new perspective on computing. In the study described in this paper, a sample of students about to graduate with their postsecondary degrees wrote about their relationship with computing and what influenced that relationship. Computing majors wrote expressively about the excitement and breadth of the discipline. Other majors were positive about computing, but the essays indicate that postsecondary education (including introductory computer science courses) did not have a large effect on their attitudes about computing.

The ubiquity of personal computational devices in the lives of today's students presents a meaningful context for courses in computer organization beyond the general-purpose or imaginary processors routinely used. This article presents results of a comparative study examining student performance in a conventional organization course and in one that has been contextualized using a personal gaming platform as the pedagogical architecture. We find minimal differences in student learning but significant motivation and engagement gains for those in the contextualized course.

Learning computing with respect to the context of its use has been linked in previous reports to student motivation in introductory Computer Science (CS) courses. In this report, we consider the role of context in a second course. We present a case study of a CS2 data structures class that uses a media computation context. In this course, students learn data structures and object-oriented (OO) programming through a pervasive narrative about how real media professionals use data structures to model the real world and to construct the digital images, sounds, and animations with which the students are familiar in their daily lives. We found that context played a different role in a second course than in a first course. We found evidence that some students did not need context to appreciate computing, but we also found evidence that context can help students get engaged with the material that they otherwise do not find interesting. In particular, the narrative aspect of a context may help students in relating the elements of the course and may even help with learning.

Learning computing with respect to the context of its use has been linked in previous reports to student motivation in introductory CS courses. In this report, we consider the role of context in a second course. We present a case study of a CS2 data structures class that uses a media computation context. In this course, students learn data structures and object-oriented programming through a pervasive narrative about how real media professionals use data structures to model the real world and to construct the digital images, sounds, and animations with which the students are familiar in their daily lives. We found that context played a different role in a second course than in a first course. We found evidence that some students did not need context to appreciate computing, but we also found evidence that context can help students get engaged with the material that they otherwise do not find interesting. In particular, the narrative aspect of a context may help students in relating the elements of the course and may even help with learning.

The Institute for Computing Education (ICE) was created in the spring of 2004. ICE is a partnership between the Georgia Department of Education and the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. The goals for this partnership are to increase the number and quality of computer science teachers and increase the number, quality, and diversity of computer science students. One specific goal is to increase the number of students taking the CS-Advanced Placement (AP) course. In this paper we report on both the progress we have made towards these goals and the problems we have encountered. We hope that other states will create similar partnerships and leverage our experience.

In his book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman convincingly explains the challenges of a global marketplace [4]. One implication is that software development can be out-sourced, as can any narrow, skills-based occupation; however, as Friedman also points out, leadership, innovation, and insight are always in demand. We have recently created and are implementing threadstm, a new structuring principle for computing curricula. Threads provides one clear path for scientists seeking to reinvent and re-invigorate science degree programs. Threads form a cohesive, coordinated set of contexts for understanding computing. The union of all threads covers the breadth computer science. The union of any two threads is sufficient to cover a science degree. In this paper, we describe Threads, our process, the impact so far, and some of our future plans. We close with recommendations for other schools, especially schools with smaller programs.

Previous studies of end-user programmers have indicated a reliance on related examples for learning. Accordingly, we analyzed the projects contained in an online community with respect to their use of introductory computing constructs. In general, the projects resemble those of novice programmers, implying the opportunity for supporting additional learning. Project authors' attention to matters of intellectual property may also directly impact other end-users' willingness to learn.

Digital photographs capture moments in time. Often these moments represent a much larger experience. Storytelling is often used to elicit these experiences from images in an attempt to communicate them to others. In this work, we focus on supporting the creation of narratives using digital images to share personal experiences. In previous work [11], we learned story development, process management and collaboration were activities essential to navigating the process of digital narrative composition. In this work, we detail our design and evaluation of iTell - a digital narrative composition tool. We employ a design process based on providing supports intended to help novice storytellers engage in the composition process like experts. We discuss our experience with our design approach and explore implications of our design decisions.

We introduce end-user programmers as a group of persons engaged in informal Computer Science education. Results of a small-scale survey for a previously unstudied population of end-users, users of graphics manipulation software, are presented. We find that graphic designers are taking part in significant programming activities, despite little to no formal training in programming. We discuss what draws them to programming, what they know about Computer Science, and where they seek help. We also consider ways in which we might further support the Computer Science learning that takes place in end-user settings.

Since its publication, Lave and Wenger's concept of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) [18] has become an important concept for understanding situated learning. LPP states that learning only occurs when students perceive that what's being taught is aligned with their goals (in LPP terms, with the students' perceived community of practice). This has implications for our traditional CS courses (e.g., are we teaching what the students perceive as being relevant for their future careers?), but even greater implications for courses for non-CS majors. When computer science educators are asked to teach non-CS majors, we are often placed in the position of teaching in alignment with a community of practice that does not, or does not yet, exist. In that sense, our teaching is inauthentic---not aligned with a community of practice. However, there is the possibility that we can generate a perception of authenticity or alignment. We use the example of two classes at Georgia Tech that seem successful by several measures, yet suffer this inauthenticity. We propose that a useful tool for understanding how these classes work is the Disney Corporation's Imagineering---their process of story-telling in three-dimensions as used in their theme parks. However, in the end, we find that what students actually learn is not necessarily the story that we are telling them, which points toward future research.

No abstract available.

Computer science has long debated what to teach in the introductory course of the discipline, and leaders in our field have argued that the introductory course approach is critical to student development. We investigated the impact of alternative approaches to introductory computing by considering the questions of what students bring to their second class in computing and how the outcomes differ depending on the students' alternative first course. Our study showed significant differences in understanding of introductory concepts, such as iteration, conditionals, and arrays, at the beginning of the second course. However, by the end of the second course their understanding had converged.

No abstract available.

This paper describes how the Institute for Computing Education (ICE) at Georgia Tech is trying to improve the state of computer science education in secondary schools in Georgia. ICE is a partnership between the Georgia Department of Education and the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. The goals for this partnership are to increase the number and quality of computer science teachers and increase the number, quality, and diversity of computer science students. One specific goal is to increase the number of students taking the CS-AP course. We believe that this partnership can serve as a model for other states.

There is growing interest in computing courses for non-CS majors. We have recently built such a course that has met with positive response. We describe our design process, which includes involvement of stakeholders and identifying a context that facilitates learning. We present evaluation results on success rates (approximately 90% of the students earn an A, B, or C) and impact of the course on students over time (80% report that the class has influenced them more than a semester later).

Innovations in teaching and learning computer science education can easily be overly-specific to a given institution, or type of institution. For example, an innovation may require special hardware, or may make assumptions about the background of the students. This paper tracks one such innovation, a multimedia-focused introductory computing course, as it moved from a research-focused university to a public two-year college. At both institutions, the new course resulted in dramatically improved retention. Students at the two-year college were even more motivated and more positive about computing after the course than students at the research university. The results suggest ways of approaching innovation that is easily adaptable to other institutions.

The SIGCSE community has produced much analysis of the dynamics causing women to choose Computer Science in disproportionately low numbers. In truth, we have learned that the factors are complex and contextual. This panel presents dynamics affecting women in four different institutions and explores the possibilities for common solutions to unique contextual problems.In the last five years, there has been extensive attention paid to the gender-gap in computer science courses (e.g., [1, 5]). Women are not succeeding in our introductory computer science courses, nor are they continuing in the curriculum, at the same rate as men. The reasons why have much to do with the context of individual courses, which can differ markedly between institutions. This panel explores how markedly different institutions can have similar outcomes, and how there may be some cross-institutional contextual issues that we might address.We will begin presenting an analysis of the results found in one university regarding the success of women in CS. Then we will present how classroom climate and the way CS is sometimes taught can lead to negative experience of studying CS at a different institution. We will suggest that interventions are necessary while students are building images of CS. We will end by presenting such an intervention that changes the classic CS1 course, and leads to changing the focus of what we're teaching.

Questions and answers about the great principles framework for computing and its impact on the organization and content of curriculum, with special attention to communicating our field, teaching programming, and appealing to a diverse audience.

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.

Literature on women in computing points out that computer science is not being effective at attracting and retaining women. Introduction to Media Computation is a new CS1 aimed especially at non-majors which was designed explicitly to address the concerns of women in computer science, such as the lack of relevance and creativity. The course is contextualized around the theme of manipulating and creating media. Of the 121 students who took the course (2/3 female), only three students dropped (all male), and 89% completed the course with a grade C or better. This paper presents data from interviews with women in the Media Computation class, then contrasts with interviews in a more traditional CS1.

Though software testing courses are commonly taught as part of software engineering curricula, software testing is still a challenging issue in software engineering education. Students frequently see testing only as something that happens at the end of the development process. Two challenges can be recognized: "how to make the students recognize the relevance of the testing activity?" and "how to motivate the students on using testing ideas in their projects?". In an attempt to explore the impact of introducing testing practices throughout development, during the past Fall semester we modified the project requirements in a course on object-oriented analysis and design offered to the undergraduate students in computer science at Georgia Institute of Technology. Our idea was to require the students to start thinking about testing as early as possible, by including testing-related practices in all phases of the development process. This paper presents the details of the testing approach used in the course and discusses the results we obtained, in terms of the students' attitudes and learning.

Ectropic Design is a feature-oriented, collaborative design method, patterned on Open Source software development. Software evolves ectropically through the continuous augmentation of its features, which are bound to specific program goals. These evolving features are defined in terms of the end-user goals the features achieve and how the features interact, both statically and dynamically, with other features. By binding source code and collaboration technology to identified program goals, Ectropic Design provides developers with the necessary mechanisms to enhance software continuously, while maintaining the conceptual integrity of the program.Ectropic Design is taught as a part of our curriculum's Sophomore required course on Objects and Desig. In the course, we introduce students to CRC cards (Class, Responsibility, Collaborator cards) and scenarios. Traditionally, CRC cards are simply 3x5 index cards, one for each class being considered in a design, annotated with two columns: One for the responsibilities of that class, and the other with the collaborators that the class will need to complete the responsibilities. Scenarios are narrative descriptions of how the system being designed should respond to user-initated events.We have students understand enjoy, and actually use CRC cards in the introductory object-oriented design process. We attempted to teach a more sophisticated design process that would grow upon the students' interest in CRC Cards, and we provided a design tool to support that process. The Ectropic Collaborative Design Environment, ECoDE, is a development tool designed to capture CRC Cards and Scenarios, and it provides a natural mechanism for tying these two design notions to the underlying code the students were writing.The results of using ECode in the class were not as promising as we had hoped. Students did develop much better scenarios than they had in the past, but they did not use the ties to code at all. More importantly, students found that ECoDE actually stifled their collaborations: With current computer monitors, it's much easier to gather around a table full of 3x5 cards than a screen of graphical index cards.Students expressed frustration in having to learn how to use ECoDE, and indicated that they were more comfortable with pencil and paper. An important indicator of the usability of ECoDE was the decision of the student whether to use ECoDE for the final two design submissions ---for it they were free to choose not to use ECoDE. It is interesting to note that 68.5% of the students voluntarily chose to use ECoDE. The top reason given for choosing to use ECoDE was its simplicity in updating their previous design versions. Of the students who chose not to use ECoDE, the reason most frequently given was that they preferred pencil and paper (44%). Subjectively, the subject group documentation was much more detailed in nature. Many of the subject group students demonstrated a clearer personal understanding of their actual design.A high level conclusion of our study could be, "Beginning students will not willingly use a detailed design process", but that is a little too simplistic. The students did appreciate CRC cards and willingly used them. They did also use some of the aspects of the Ectropic Design process, such as the emphasis on scenarios. But simply putting things in a computer tool does not make them better. Student's primary goal is the completion of the program, not the design. The limitations of a one semester course makes it difficult to make it otherwise. It is the challenge of educators to build design tools that will be adopted that meet that goal. Studying ECode has given us some insight on how best to proceed to meet that challenge.

Computing may well become considered an essential part of a liberal education, but introductory programming courses will not look like the way that they do today. Current CSI course are failing dramatically. We are developing a new course, to be taught starting in Spring 2003, which uses computation for communication as a guiding principle. Students learn to program by writing Python programs for manipulating sound, images, and movies. This paper describes the course development and the tools developed for the course. The talk will include the first round of assessment results.

While there is a lot of speculation about the benefits of multimedia exploration, research on learning and technology suggests that the creation of media by students has even greater benefit for learning. Students learn through articulating their knowledge in their multimedia documents, reviewing their own work, and receiving comments and critiques on their work. In the research of the Collaborative Software Lab (http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl), we are particularly interested in exploring the creation of media through collaborative technology. By having students work together in creating diverse media, we encourage review and critique, and create opportunities for joint learning. We have been using an environment for collaborative multimedia in several computer science classes, and in this paper, we describe some of the activities that teachers have invented for using the CoWeb.

Squeak is a new programming language based on an old one that skipped some 15 years of development. Squeak is highly cross-platform, running on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, BeOS, and Windows CE devices (among others) bit-identically. It has been updated with modern features, such as web browsing and serving, 3-D graphics engine, and powerful sound synthesis. Squeak is an excellent pedagogical platform because it doesn't presume a windowing operating system. Instead, Squeak implements all of the windowing and other user interface software itself, providing both a rich set of examples and a bare substrate on which one can explore and build user interfaces from scratch. We have used Squeak both to enhance the infrastructure for our course, and to change how we teach user interfaces. We present a pilot study suggesting benets of the new approach. 1 Squeak's Beginnings Smalltalk-80 was developed by the Learning Research Group (LRG) at Xerox PARC, and is widely viewed as the rst system to ...

We hope to alert attendees of this panel to a number of aspects of CS education research:• previous work that provides good models for future research;• current projects and results;• areas that deserve more inquiry;• questions for which research is unlikely at the moment to yield useful information.The panel is aimed at people who don't need to be convinced about the value of CS education research, but who perhaps are unfamiliar with what's happening or how they might get involved themselves.

The Web is used for many purposes in education, such as the publication of course management information, centralized distribution of course material, and supporting on-line discussions between instructors and students or among the students themselves. Leveraging off the Web for educational activities both inside and outside the classroom produces a dynamic educational repository. In this paper, we present work that explicitly attempts to connect in-class activity, in the form of multimedia, Web-accessible captured lectures, with collaborative discussion spaces. Flexible and dynamic interfaces for the captured lectures and the discussion spaces are presented, as well as specialized interfaces that connect the two. We discuss our experience in a recent course taught using this integrated and dynamic educational repository and explain how our experience has lead to some solutions for visualizing the changes that occur over this rich space.

In this paper, we describe our experience with the long-term, widespread use of CoWeb, an asynchronous collaborative tool that is mostly used to complement existing face-to-face groups (such as classes). The CoWeb is an openended tool that does not enforce or explicitly support specific roles or usage, yet several well-defined uses and roles have emerged over time. In our design methodology, we recognize these roles and refine our collaboration environment to better support them.

Article Free Access Share on Balancing usability and learning in an interface Authors: Noel Rappin College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GAView Profile , Mark Guzdial College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GAView Profile , Matthew Realff School of Chemical Engineering, Georgia Instiute of Technology, Atlanta, GA School of Chemical Engineering, Georgia Instiute of Technology, Atlanta, GAView Profile , Pete Ludovice School of Chemical Engineering, Georgia Instiute of Technology, Atlanta, GA School of Chemical Engineering, Georgia Instiute of Technology, Atlanta, GAView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '97: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systemsMarch 1997 Pages 479–486https://doi.org/10.1145/258549.258995Published:27 March 1997Publication History 9citation494DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations9Total Downloads494Last 12 Months6Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my Alerts New Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

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The wide accessibility of the World Wide Web makes it a perfect base for developing computer science courseware modules. Since learning involves more than just receiving transmitted information, courseware must be interactive and encourage student engagement, which is a challenge on the Web architecture. This article describes an ongoing effort to develop World Wide Web-based computer science courseware modules that will use interactive components as integral parts of the material, in order to promote student involvement. It also discusses the proposed usage of new technology such as HotJava in this framework.

article Centralized mindset: a student problem with object-oriented programming Share on Author: Mark Guzdial College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GeorgiaView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGCSE BulletinVolume 27Issue 1March 1995 pp 182–185https://doi.org/10.1145/199691.199772Online:15 March 1995Publication History 27citation590DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations27Total Downloads590Last 12 Months20Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

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Software maintenance programmers face the daunting task of understanding and modifying complex, unfamiliar programs that contain delocalized plans (conceptually related code that is not located contiguously in a program). Our research shows that programmers use an as-needed strategy when searching for the delocalized components which they need to understand. We have developed a maintenance tool, Whorf, that provides explicit support for visualizing and understanding delocalized plans using an as-needed strategy. Whorf supports this strategy through multiple, concurrent views of the software with instant, easy access to additional views. It supports the understanding of delocalized plans by providing hypertext links between views to highlight interactions between physically disparate components. A study comparing the usage of Whorf and paper documentation shows that the dynamic views and structure supported by Whorf provide information more quickly and easily than the static structure of paper documentation.