Video content, including lectures and tutorials on platforms like YouTube, has become an invaluable source of informal support for computing students. However, with the emergence of short-form videos on TikTok as a possible new resource, we conducted a content analysis of 300 TikTok videos about computing careers to investigate how creators present career-related content. Our analysis found that videos offered valuable insights about daily job experiences, educational resources, and advice about securing internships. However, the content often lacked concrete actionable guidance. Videos often reinforce stereotypes about computing careers, emphasizing high salaries and remote work over other benefits, such as meaningful and impactful work. Creators also performed expertise and identity by mentioning their credentials, showing their face, and speaking directly to the camera. These findings show how biases in career content, reinforced by creators' trust-building performances, may potentially influence students' expectations and values around computing careers.

This Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session provides a space for LGBTQ+ educators, researchers, students, and allies to connect, share, and collaborate. It builds upon the strong foundation of previous successful BOFs focused on cultivating and sustaining the LGBTQ+ community (Kivuva et al., 2025) and the broad interest shown in panels on advancing LGBTQIA+ voices (DuBow et al., 2024). Recognizing the diverse needs within our community, this session is built around four concurrent, facilitated breakout groups, allowing attendees to self-select into the conversation most relevant to them. The importance of affinity spaces for ''gender-based community building'' and fostering a sense of belonging is a key aspect of broadening participation (Swackhamer et al., 2022). The session will begin with a collective welcome and introduction to ground us in a shared sense of community before self-selecting into roundtables. The four roundtable themes are: (1) An affinity space for sharing personal experiences from the past year; (2) Supporting LGBTQ+ students and building departmental community; (3) Advancing LGBTQ+-focused research in CS education; and (4) Professional development focused on grant writing and career advancement. This unique structure ensures that, whether attendees are seeking peer support, pedagogical strategies, research collaboration, or career mentorship, they will find a dedicated space. Participants will leave with new connections and targeted, actionable insights to support their personal and professional lives.

This Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session offers LGBTQ+ researchers, educators, and practitioners in computing education an inclusive space for community-building, advocacy, and creative expression. The session seeks to expand beyond traditional networking by offering attendees a variety of opt-in activities, such as fiber arts, crafting, media sharing, and Pittsburgh-themed games. Attendees will have the opportunity to decompress after a long conference day, participate in discussions on queer scholarship and activism, and explore ways to make computing education more inclusive to LGBTQ+ individuals.

Representational forms are central to how we explore, communicate, and learn. Yet, they can be challenging to engage with as designers because they vary across disciplines, cultures, and communities. In this paper, we describe our analysis of a dance and computing learning environment through the lens of distributed cognition to examine how representations and processing of information across people and systems impacted the learning process. We analyzed video and audio data from three workshops of dance and STEM instructors learning about, creating with, and co-designing computing activities with danceON—a creative computing platform that supports coding animations over dance videos. We identified the ways that the instructors used their bodies as a shared point of negotiation while co-creating dance artifacts, the participatory role of danceON within the sensemaking process, the ways that the instructors interpreted and translated representations across physical and digital spaces, and the impact of the instructors’ collaborative interactions to their sensemaking.

Tangible programming languages (TPL) involve physical objects, often interlocking blocks, that represent computer programming elements. Users connect TPL blocks in logical chains to construct code that typically controls the behavior of another device. Designed for young children, they offer a playful and embodied approach to computer science education. While these systems can effectively teach basic programming concepts, TPL code lacks transferability and expressivity, which limits the types of problems that learners can engage with. Our work explores how designing for the multimodality of TPLs can support greater complexity in programming concepts, a smoother transition to advanced programming settings, and enhanced learner expression. We present touchBase, a TPL that leverages concepts in physical computing and principles of Gestalt psychology to support a culturally-sustaining approach to CS learning design.

Creative computing education can support engagement and learning across artistic and computational disciplines, while providing opportunities for meaningful expression. Prior work has shown that constructing with electronic textiles [6, 12] (alongside restorying practices [13]) and physical computing kits [7] empower learners to highlight personal and community values and stories while challenging and reimagining dominant narratives. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in recent years has created an influx of attention on how to teach AI across a variety of learners. Work on AI literacy often aims to equip learners with interdisciplinary skills to use and produce with AI technologies while also being critical about their designs. These have led to the development of frameworks to describe and outline what constitutes AI literacy [1, 8, 14] and the exploration of creative computing as an avenue for AI/ML education. While research has shown some benefits of creative computing for AI education, such as by facilitating sensemaking of AI through embodied exploration and co-creation and the critical reflection on the limits, tensions, and ethics around AI [2, 15, 16], there is limited work on identifying the specific AI competencies that creative computing tools and environments support.

A key problem in achieving access to and sustained presence in computing and computing education (CEd) in the United States is environments that are all too often designed in ways that are harmful and inequitable toward systemically minoritized communities. While various scholars have explored ways to design equitable spaces within differing contexts, often, equity is framed merely as an issue of access. This dismisses the lived experiences of minoritized communities and can lead to shallow perspectives of equity that fail to address community concerns and further push these communities out of sustained participation and presence in computing and CEd. Drawing from a critical and abolitionist lens, we argue that equitable spaces must nurture community: where healing, joy, and care are centered, and participants can bring their full selves into the space. In this experience report, we present three case narratives highlighting the spaces we designed to build community. The case narratives describe: (1) conference workshops on centering equity in CEd, (2) a workshop series enabling marginalized people to share stories of their experiences in CEd, and (3) a podcast inviting voices from varied contexts, experiences, and backgrounds to share their stories and perspectives on themes related to equity within CEd. The case narratives point to the value of designing spaces that go beyond granting access, emphasizing spaces that nurture community. Our approach fostered a sense of comfort, mutual trust, and the bravery to (re)imagine other possibilities, empowering participants to discuss issues of equity within the spaces they occupy.

Neoliberal capitalism - the favoring of privatization, marketization, and deregulation of public resources - is hegemonic in education. It shapes our institutions and everyday life, including educational practices. The increasing push for market driven computing curriculum and large tech companies' involvement in research grants and educational programs are some examples of neoliberal influences in CS education. It is not only industry and industry-backed not-for-profits such as Code.org that reify neoliberal agendas, but in many cases, our very own communities, educational institutions, and curricula. Thus, a critical and reflective examination of our educational practices is necessary. In this Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session, we aim to conduct reflections and discussions on the role and influence of neoliberal capitalism in computing education. We will explore 1) the influence of deregulation, 2) public-private partnerships, 3) state-subsidized corporate wealth accumulation, and 4) centralization on pedagogy, research, and academic "success". We will discover reflective questions and practices that could help us critically examine our roles and responsibilities as computing educators and professionals. Eventually, we hope to begin a larger conversation and form a community to develop collective strategies and pedagogical ideologies to resist neoliberal influences, reimagine alternatives, and repair damages caused by neoliberal computing education.

This Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session will offer LGBTQ+ researchers and practitioners at SIGCSE TS a space for networking, sharing experiences, and being in community together. Given the consistent marginalization of the LGBTQ+ community, this BOF aims to create a community at SIGCSE of professors, students, researchers, and practitioners with interest in computing education. The BOF will provide a space for people to decompress from the long conference day through playing board games and socializing. There is also space for attendees to discuss ways computing education and SIGCSE could be more inclusive to the LGBTQ+ community.

Wearable electronics expand the ways learners can create with computing as they gain proficiency with programming and electronics. Dance is one domain where wearables can support creative, embodied practices in computing education. However, wearable electronics need to be small, durable, and easily integrated into clothing to meet the constraints of dance contexts. These features are challenging to achieve, especially when working with novices. We present DanceBits, a wearable prototyping kit for dance that was co-developed with a justice-oriented, computing and dance education organization. DanceBits’ plug-and-play system uses small PCBs with solderless connectors to support dancers in rapidly designing, building, and performing with electronic costumes. Our user studies exploring the system with dance instructors and youth participants show that DanceBits enabled fast development of wearables, offered users a breadth of expressivity through computational and choreographic choices, and empowered dancers to see wearables as a tool for developing their movement practices.

Artistic computing learning environments have been of central importance in the exploration of how to support equity and inclusion in computing. Explorations within e-textiles, music, and interactive media, for example, have created diverse opportunities for learning how to program while creating culturally relevant artifacts. However, there is a gap in our understanding of the design processes of learners in these constructionist environments, including how the computational artifacts and their components impact the learning processes and the ways they build meaning and agency with computing. We advocate for research to attend more closely to the materiality of the computational materials to understand how they impact the social and cultural dimensions in which students are learning. In this paper, we present an analysis of 6 high school learners’ experiences within a co-designed arts and computing curriculum. Our analyses highlight how the materiality of the components impacted the ways in which learners developed personal and epistemological connections to computing based on how it enabled them to connect to their interests, represent their ideas, engage with their community, and overcome or navigate around challenges to get to their final designs. We demonstrate how centralizing the materiality in the design of computational construction kits can inform how we support agency and engagement with computing.

This experience report details pilot deployments of the Platform for Ethics and Responsible Computing Education (PEaRCE) in undergraduate computer science (CS) courses. PEaRCE is an online learning environment designed to immerse undergraduate CS students in realistic interactive work scenarios. The simulated work scenarios illustrate how technical CS course material can be readily exploited towards the creation of appealing systems, which nevertheless can be instruments of harm to others. Students take the role of an employee within a project and are given details about the project. Students then decide whether to continue with the project immediately, or to first talk to various project stakeholders who could provide additional information about the project and its impacts. At the end of the simulation, students are provided information about the project scenario, including the potential impacts of the project and feedback on stakeholder conversation choices. We report on preliminary findings from pilot deployments of PEaRCE in undergraduate CS courses, including student feedback about PEaRCE and the simulation scenarios and discuss future directions for the design of the system and its use in future CS courses.

We describe the use of comics to teach computing by having learners create, design, and arrange comic panels. We designed comic-based learning toolkits, guided by the following research question: How do we support the informal learning of computing concepts for elementary school learners through a physical comic-based learning toolkit? This question emerged as a result of our partnership with a community organization that teaches art to elementary school learners through the production and distribution of art subscription boxes. Subscription boxes contain art materials and instruction manuals that learners can use to create artistic artifacts at home. Partnering with the organization, we explored how to teach computing through art activities and designed a subscription box for comic creation activities that used materials such as paper comic panels, coloring pens, magnets, and activity manuals. Our learning toolkits guide learners to use computing concepts in the story-crafting process, for example: decomposing narratives with comic panels, sequencing comic panels to create a narrative flow, using conditionals (e.g., if-else) for character decision-making within the story, using loops to repeat comic story events, and iterating on or refining the comic to create and develop a cohesive narrative flow.

The computing education (CEd) research community's growth is fueled in part by the growing number of CEd Ph.D. graduates, who are also increasingly entering postdoctoral positions and fellowships. While prior work has shown that postdoctoral researchers have positive effects on research labs, provide essential support to graduate students, and serve critical roles in the research ecosystem, there are no existing support structures for postdoctoral researchers within CEd. As postdocs navigate the challenges of their new positions alongside the demands of research and job searches, they would benefit from a community of peers wherein they could share their experiences and learn from others. This Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session is an organized space for CEd postdoctoral researchers, including those interested in postdoctoral positions, to build community and share postdoc experiences. Building on prior experience with running a similar BoF space for postdocs in SIGCSE 2022, the BoF discussion leaders is composed of current CEd postdocs, previous CEd postdocs who have taken on academic and research careers, and a CEd researcher from a non-academic space. This combination of diverse experiences, career contexts, and expertise will provide valuable perspectives that will aid in discussions of various postdoc experiences and research and career opportunities. BoF participants will have opportunities to discuss research goals, areas, and activities; exchange advice on navigating career paths and job searches; discuss approaches for mentorship within and outside research labs; and share best practices on the postdoc experience.

In this Birds of a Feather, we will discuss the roles of computing education in preparing students to understand and address the disparate impacts of climate change in local and global contexts. We intend to have open discussions on the challenges and opportunities related to connecting computing education with climate change and the injustices that climate change exacerbates. We will focus discussions around three questions: (1) How can we center justice-based perspectives on understanding and addressing climate change in computing education? (2) What are the relationships between computing, climate change, and overall environmental impacts? and (3) How should we reimagine traditional notions of "development" and "progress" in computing in ways that challenge how current framings within computing misunderstand or misteach computing's environmental impacts? We invite all computing educators, researchers, administrators, practitioners and anyone else with any level of curiosity about climate change to join this discussion (because it affects all of us!). Expected outcomes for this Birds of a Feather include sharing resources and experiences to build a community for knowledge sharing and collaborations.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems are ubiquitous across many fields ranging from medicine (e.g., tumor detection), to natural language processing (e.g., digital home assistants, auto-translate tools), and personalization (e.g., social media recommendations). The rise of these systems has also seen a rise in the ethical challenges resulting from how some of these systems are designed and implemented. Most problematic is their propagation and amplification of problems such as racism and sexism [4, 6], among others. Further, these challenges exist within a computing discipline that is already burdened by exclusive, marginalizing cultures and practices that lead to low participation by women and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) [3]. Our project, AI + Dance, attends to these dimensions of inequity within AI/ML education through developing our understanding of how we can equip learners to recognize and rectify issues of AI and ML systems within an inclusive and culturally sustaining experience. We explore this in collaboration with STEM From Dance1 (SFD), a non-profit organization that supports girls of color in creative production with dance, CS, and STEM.

One challenge in teaching computational thinking (CT) in K-12 is that teachers often lack resources to teach CT in their classrooms. In this work, we explore the use of game creation as an avenue for teaching CT. We describe WearableLearning, an online platform with a finite-state machine-based interface for creating games and discuss how students can use it to learn and practice CT skills such as algorithmic thinking, problem decomposition, and debugging. Our goal is to empower teachers to teach CT through engaging game creation activities that enable students to create games and play the games that their peers developed through wearable devices.

\emphTime-on-task is one key contributor to learning. However, how time-on-task is measured often varies, and is limited by the available data. In this work, we study two different time-on-task metrics---derived from programming process data---for predicting performance in an introductory programming course. The first metric, coarse-grained time-on-task, is based on students' submissions to programming assignments; the second, fine-grained time-on-task, is based on the keystrokes that students take while constructing their programs. Both types of time-on-task metrics have been used in prior work, and are supposedly designed to measure the same underlying feature: time-on-task. However, previous work has found that the correlation between these two metrics is not as high as one might expect. We build on that work by analyzing how well the two metrics work for predicting students' performance in an introductory programming course. Our results suggest that the correlation between the fine-grained time-on-task metric and both weekly exercise points and exam points is higher than the correlation between the coarse-grained time-on-task metric and weekly exercise points and exam points. Furthermore, we show that the fine-grained time-on-task metric is a better predictor of students' future success in the course exam than the coarse-grained time-on-task metric. We thus propose that future work utilizing time-on-task as a predictor of performance should use as fine-grained data as possible to measure time-on-task if such data is available.

There is a growing number of Ph.D. graduates whose research focuses on computing education, and they are significantly fueling the growth of the computing education research community. As more computing education Ph.D. graduates weigh their options on the job market, they are increasingly entering postdoctoral positions. For example, seven Computing Innovation Fellows positions over the last two years have been awarded to computing education researchers. Research shows that postdoctoral researchers have positive, cascading effects on research labs. However, despite the critical role they play in the research ecosystem, and the growing importance of postdoctoral positions in career development, there are no support structures for postdoctoral researchers in the computing education research community. This Birds-of-a-Feather session is an organized opportunity for postdoctoral researchers and those interested in postdoctoral positions to connect with one another, share postdoc experiences, and generate best practices. Attendees will have opportunities to discuss research goals and activities, career trajectories and opportunities, future conference and publication plans, pathways for future collaborations, and advice for the postdoc experience.

In this hands-on workshop participants will experience the curricula from three NSF funded projects, which engage youth in creating art with and about AI technologies while exploring related ethical concerns.

K-12 computing teachers need guidance on how to best implement student-centered practices for teaching programming, particularly in block-based programming environments (BBPEs) [10]. One way to provide such guidance to teachers is through Integrated Development Environment (IDE)-based learning analytics [4], which involves collecting data on students’ interactions with IDEs, translating them into meaningful information about students’ learning processes, and designing interventions that are grounded in such data. Most of the work on IDE-based learning analytics have focused on university-level introductory computer science courses (e.g., BlueJ [6]) that taught text-based programming languages. Specific to BBPEs, there has been significant analytics work with iSnap [7], which focused on offering intelligent tutoring to students based on their actions within the IDE. Little work, however, has been done on IDE-based learning analytics in Scratch [9]; prior work on Scratch learning analytics used clickstream data to characterize students’ programming abilities, which fails to fully capture students’ learning processes [3]. For K-12 teachers teaching with Scratch, collecting and analyzing data beyond clickstream (e.g., ProgSnap2 [8]) can provide more insight on student programming behaviors and how students learn to program with Scratch. Insight provided by a richer set of Scratch learning process data could empower teachers to design classroom interventions (e.g., feedback, scaffolds) to proactively respond to student needs; the use of Scratch learning analytics to inform the design of classroom interventions has not been thoroughly explored in IDE-based learning analytics [4].

Intuitively, it seems plausible that students who start their work earlier and work on more days than their peers should perform better in any course. But does the early bird really catch the worm? In this article, we examine introductory programming students' time management behavior as evidenced by data collected from a programming environment. We analyze: 1) the earliness of students' work, i.e. when they start working on their course assignments, 2) the number of days students work on course assignments, and 3) the relationship between earliness, the number of days worked, and course outcomes. Our results provide further support for the notion that, on average, students who start working on course assignments early perform slightly better in the course. At the same time, we found that starting early does not necessarily mean that students work on more days, and that starting early and working on many days does not necessarily mean that students get better grades. In addition, some students who start working early on the assignments in the first weeks of the course seem to start delaying when they begin working on assignments as the course progresses, while other students seem to be able to continue starting early throughout the course.

Systems of power - such as structural racism, a system that upholds the ideology of white supremacy - are invisible and permeate our everyday lives and un/intentionally into our research. As these systems influence what counts as 'successful' work, CSEd researchers often have to assimilate ('whiten') themselves and their work into dominant ideals that uphold these structures. This workshop brings together aspiring and early-career CSEd researchers to critically examine and unpack the impacts of systems of power on ourselves and our research practices. Such examination is necessary to strive towards a critical consciousness in the field. We investigate critical questions like the following: What are systems of power? Who has the right to participate? Who has the right to exclude? We will use group-based activities that center historicities and 'outsider' knowledge to examine CSEd research practices and theories to answer these questions. We will draft a set of guidelines and recommendations available to the broader CSEd research community from the discussions and activities.

Cognitive theories of how programmers produce code suggest that novices' approaches are primarily driven by the retrieval of previously-learned plans. These plans can be high-level, focusing on task decomposition and composition, or low-level, focusing on code implementations. These theories, however, do not describe how novices move between high-level tasks and low-level code, especially when faced with novel problems. Understanding these transitions can help concretely tease out why and where novices struggle and how they use their knowledge of plans and design techniques when they get stuck. We studied this by conducting think-alouds with CS1 students at two universities as they solved multi-task programming problems with unfamiliar components. Our analysis paid particular attention to a series of design techniques that the students had been explicitly taught in their respective courses. We identified patterns of high- and low-level thinking that relate to students' success on the problems, and propose a concrete framework of high- and low-level work that summarizes the transitions that we observed.

Prior studies suggest that novice programmers approach problems by retrieving previously-learned plans. These plans can be high-level (encompassing decomposition and composition of tasks) or low-level (focused mainly on code). What happens when novices face programming problems that compose tasks in new ways or that involve tasks they haven't seen before? How do they move between high-level tasks and low-level code? What does this suggest about how to teach programming?

Program-design is an essential skill students in introductory computing courses must learn, but which continues to be difficult for students. Many introductory curricula focuses on low-level constructs, even when students are expected to gain higher-level problem-solving and program-design skills. How to Design Programs (HTDP) is a curriculum that teaches a multi-step approach to program-design, promoting multiple, interrelated program-design skills. My research explores how novice programmers use HTDP-based techniques to design programs, the design-related skills students learn and use, the factors that drive their design decisions, and how these weave into a conceptual framework of HTDP-based program-design.

When functional programming is used in studies of the Rainfall problem in CS1, most students seem to perform fairly well. A handful of students, however, still struggle, though with different surface-level errors than those reported for students programming imperatively. Prior research suggests that novice programmers tackle problems by refining a high-level program schema that they have seen for a similar problem. Functional-programming students, however, have often seen multiple schemas that would apply to Rainfall. How do novices navigate these choices? This paper presents results from a talk-aloud study in which novice functional programmers worked on Rainfall. We describe the criteria that drove students to select, and sometimes switch, their high-level program schema, as well as points where students realized that their chosen schema was not working. Our main contribution lies in our observations of how novice programmers approach a multi-task planning problem in the face of multiple viable schemas.

Students in first-year computing courses deal with programming problems that can be solved through various solutions that organize the problem's tasks in different ways. Selecting among these organizations of code or program plans and implementing them depends on various factors such as prior knowledge of solutions and features of programming languages used. Additionally, problem solving through effective program planning continues to be difficult for students; instruction in many first-year courses focuses on low-level constructs without discussing higher-level plans and students are left to figure out strategies for problem decomposition and code composition on their own. My research explores ways to teach planning strategies effectively so students will be able to learn to apply these strategies as well as transfer the use of these strategies across problems.

When students are faced with a programming problem unlike any they have solved before, prior research suggests that they develop code backwards from essential computations in the problem. Some curricula, however, teach students to first write scaffolding code based on the type of the input data. How do these two approaches interact? We gave CS1 students who were taught to write scaffolding code a programming problem unlike any they had seen before. We found that while students put essential computations into the scaffolds, they often overuse affordances of the scaffolds in ways that lead to plan-composition errors. We propose that steering students away from on-the-fly decomposition while programming could help avoid some of these errors.

Problem solving through effective plan decomposition and composition continues to be exceedingly difficult for novice programmers. This is exacerbated by the fact that these strategies are usually implicit in instruction: students are left to figure out their own problem solving strategies. My research investigates ways to elicit and improve students' plan decomposition and composition strategies.

In January 2013, the eHealth TABLET (Technology Assisted Boards for Local government unit Efficiency and Transparency) project began with a two-fold objective of: 1) creating a tablet based system that will integrate existing health information systems to address the national objective of a unified health information management system by 2015 and 2) to create a transparency layer at the local government units such that communication lines between municipal health officers and the mayor are monitored. Bottom up approach was used to ensure that all features requested by multi-stakeholders are included in the design of the system. The end product was a mobile - web based system with the mobile application having three main components: the electronic medical record (EMR) application which comprises of the patient record and diagnosis module, the requests/approval application, and the dashboard application for data visualization. Responding to the needs of intended users, the web based application provides the following features: web auxiallry entry, aggregated disease report application and usage monitoring. Regular usage monitoring increased usage over time. For ICT development projects in public health, iteratve involvement of multi-stakeholders is necessary to ensure higher acceptance and adoption. From a design perspective, technologies should be designed to be interoperable such that interfacing with existing systems will be seamless.