Embedded ethics education integrates ethical considerations into computer sciences courses in support of ethics-informed design, development, and deployment of technology. Scholarly assessment has demonstrated that such modules can influence students' attitudes about the relevance and importance of ethics to their work, as well as their perceived ability to tackle ethical issues in the workplace. In this paper, we report on a study that investigates whether embedded ethics modules have an impact beyond the classroom. Specifically, we examine whether embedded ethics modules influence students to learn more about ethics on their own, whether students are better able to recognize ethical issues when they enter the workplace for an industrial or research work experience, and whether they report that the modules they participated in helped them to navigate the ethical situations they encountered at work. While further assessment is needed to investigate these questions fully, our results suggest that embedded ethics modules can indeed have this kind of positive impact beyond the classroom.

Embedding ethics modules in computer science (CS) courses is an approach to post-secondary ethics education that has been gaining traction. In contrast to dedicated courses on ethics in CS, embedding ethics modules into CS courses supports tight connections between ethical considerations and CS concepts, as well as enabling repeated exposure to ethics across multiple courses. Initial studies of the effectiveness of such modules suggest that this approach can increase both student interest in ethics and technology, and student self-efficacy towards incorporating ethical considerations in their computing work. Departments wishing to deploy embedded ethics (EE) modules need to decide how to invest resources, including class time, to maximize effectiveness while maintaining curriculum objectives. Such considerations include the number of EE module experiences a student has throughout their degree program, as well as the spacing of those experiences.

Technology is shaping the way people live, work, and interact with each other, and graduates of our computer science programs increasingly find themselves designing algorithms and using data that raise ethical issues they may not be aware of or equipped to address. Courses that contemplate the role of technology in society have been a standard, but often optional, part of curricula for years. An emerging alternative is to embed ethical discussions as modules within CS courses. This approach offers the opportunity to tie ethical issues to technical content at the moment students learn it, and to have students engage with these issues repeatedly throughout their degree. However, little is known about the effect of embedded ethics education on students.

The Nifty Assignments special session is all about promoting and sharing the ideas and ready-to-use materials of successful assignments. Each presenter will introduce their assignment, give a quick demo, and describe its niche in the curriculum and its strengths and weaknesses. The presentations (and the descriptions below) merely introduce the assignment. A key part of Nifty Assignments is the mundane but vital role of distributing the materials - handouts, data files, starter code, rubrics - that make each assignment ready to adopt. Each assignment presented has complete materials freely available on the Nifty Assignments home page nifty.stanford.edu. If you have an assignment that works well and would be of interest to the CSE community, please consider applying to present at Nifty Assignments.

Booming interest in computer science and innovations in the way we teach it have allowed us to teach a larger, more demographically and geographically diverse group of students. One of the new challenges facing us now is that it can be harder for instructors to get to know many of their students, and for students to connect with their peers. Building community in our physical and virtual classrooms is difficult, but important for the success and learning experience of our students. Community is especially important for "non-traditional" CS students, who are more likely to struggle with imposter syndrome, or to feel like they don't belong in a CS classroom. Building Community in Large or Virtual Classrooms In this BoF session, we'll discuss the strategies, activities, and interventions we've tried and found successful or unsuccessful in building course community, and helping students believe they belong in CS.

An exam wrapper is a structured activity that students engage in after their instructor has graded and returned an exam, and is designed to promote self-reflection and improve study practices. This paper describes two studies examining the efficacy and student perceptions of exam wrappers. The studies were conducted at two major Canadian universities, using complementary research designs. We report that neither study produced evidence that exam wrappers have a significant effect on final exam scores or on course drop rates. However, we also find that the use of wrappers was associated with improved rates of test pickup and increased scores on a course evaluation question regarding the fairness of evaluation methods. Given these results, we advise instructors who are considering the use of exam wrappers to review the evidence for other possible interventions that may more effectively serve the same goals.

Enrollment in post-secondary online courses has been increasing, but several studies have found that the drop rates in online courses are higher than in face-to-face. In our previous study comparing an online section of CS1 with a face-to-face flipped section, we also found the drop rate higher in the online section. Given that we plan to continue offering online options for our students, we aim to identify factors associated with success in online CS1. In this paper, we examine factors that are under students' own control such as how fully they participate in ungraded but important learning activities, and other factors that we may be able to manipulate and improve, such as students' skills for self-regulated learning, and their sense of community in the course. We found important differences between the online and flipped sections regarding what behaviours and attributes were associated with success. While completion of unmarked practice exercises was a factor for both sections, test anxiety and self-efficacy were factors only for the online section, and intrinsic goal orientation was a factor only for the flipped section.

In addition to their role as a summative measure, midterm tests can provide formative feedback that can be used by students to identify areas of weakness and adjust studying approaches. Unfortunately, low levels of test pickup often preclude this type of learning from tests. Even when students do collect their marked tests, it is unclear how much they reflect on or learn from the feedback.

When students can choose to take a course online or face-to-face, who chooses each format? Why do students select one format instead of the other? We compare an online section of CS1 to a concurrent face-to-face section and find that the populations in the two sections are very different. In particular, students in the online section have less prior programming experience and are less likely to intend to major in computer science. We also examine the reasons why students choose their section, many of which relate to convenience, desire for interaction with others, and degree of familiarity with the course material. Finally, we compare course outcomes for the two sections. We find significant differences in drop rates, but not in final exam scores. We investigate whether the differences we find can be explained by differences in the populations who choose to take the course online vs face-to-face.

Many database courses rely on relational algebra (RA) to provide a theoretical foundation for database query languages such as SQL. However, few tools exist to support students in learning RA. To fill this need, we created RAPT. RAPT uses a syntactic and semantic understanding of RA to transform input statements into a variety of outputs, including LATEX formatted queries, parse tree diagrams, and executable SQL statements. The translation to SQL is particularly important, as it enables the creation of automatically tested exercises and allows students to view the result of executing an RA statement. RAPT-supported exercises have been integrated into PCRS, a system for creating online learning modules, and deployed to a third year databases course with over 350 students.

Alumni make contributions to a Computer Science program in three interconnected ways, all of which relate to the interplay between the academic environment and the "real world." For students who aim to enter the job market upon graduation, alumni provide a friendly way to receive mentoring and advice and develop a professional network. When faculty are looking for real-world projects and experiences for students, alumni provide an avenue for entrance into industry. Finally, alumni can provide assessment data about the performance of students in the workplace after graduation.

Much attention has been paid to the failure rate in CS1 and attrition between CS1 and CS2. In our study of 1236 CS1 students, we examine subgroups of students, to find out how characteristics such as prior experience and reason for taking the course influence who drops, fails, or passes, and who continues on to CS2. We also examine whether student characteristics influence outcomes differently in traditional vs. inverted offerings of the course. We find that more students in the inverted offering failed the midterm test, but those who failed were much more likely to either drop the course or recover and ultimately pass the course. While we find no difference between the offerings in the overall drop-fail-pass rates or in the percentage and types of students who go on to take CS2, there is a significant, widely felt, boost in exam grades in the inverted offering.

The inverted or flipped classroom has been shown to be effective in computer science. Inverted teaching depends on students engaging in both pre- and in-lecture activities. What reward structure will motivate students to do so? We report on our experience with inverted teaching for a one-month unit in a third-year database course.

We compare a traditional CS1 offering with an inverted offering delivered the following year to a comparable student population. We measure student attitudes, grades, and final course outcomes and find that, while students in the inverted offering do not report increased enjoyment and are no more likely to pass, learning as measured by final exam performance increases significantly. This increase is not simply a function of a more onerous inverted offering, as students report spending similar time per week in the traditional and inverted offerings. Contrary to our hypotheses, however, we find no evidence that the the inverted offering disproportionally helps beginners or those not fully fluent in English.

This case study explores an inverted classroom offering of an introductory programming course (CS1). Students prepared for lecture by watching short lecture videos and completing required in-video quiz questions. During lecture, the students worked through exercises with the support of the instructor and teaching assistants. We describe the course implementation and its assessment, including pre- and post-course surveys. We also discuss lessons learned, modifications that we plan to make for the next offering, and recommendations for others teaching inverted courses.

In the interest of better understanding why many students fail to complete CS1 successfully, we analyze a class of 555 CS1 students, 127 of whom either failed or dropped the course. We find that students with previous experience are more likely to pass even if the experience is not a formal programming course. Contrary to intuition, students who drop have enrolled in fewer courses and have fewer hours of non-school commitments than those who stay. We present a classification scheme to categorize student outcomes based on their performance at a course midpoint.

Instructors often put students into groups for coursework. Several tools exist to facilitate this process, but they typically limit the criteria one can use for forming groups. We have defined a general mathematical model for group formation: a set of attribute types, group-formation criteria, and fitness measures. We have implemented an optimizer that uses an evolutionary algorithm to create groups according to the instructor's criteria. Our experiments support the hypothesis that, even with a general model, reasonably optimal solutions to the group-formation problem can be found in reasonable time. Several instructors have used the tool to form groups for their courses. In all cases, they were impressed by the expressiveness of the model and pleased with the quality of the groups produced.

In order to address the under-representation of women in Computer Science, we have created a program for middle-school girls that specifically aims to change their attitudes about CS and encourages them to see it as a potential career. Our assessment of the program shows that it did indeed have a significant, positive impact and suggests that this was still in effect three months later. This paper describes the program and its assessment, and makes suggestions for those considering offering a similar program.