This work in progress innovative practice paper is focused on the development of S-STEM scholarship application. The purpose of the National Science Foundation's S-STEM program is to provide support for “academically talented lowincome students” through scholarships and accompanying programming, which fosters their recruitment, retention, and ultimately their graduation with STEM degrees [1]. The S-STEM program requires awardees to provide for all of the annual unmet financial need of individual Pell-eligible scholars, up to $15,000 per undergraduate scholar and $20,000 per graduate scholar. The S-STEM dollars must be applied after all other funding sources have been exhausted for a student. Awardees may develop recruitment programs within disadvantaged communities and under resourced schools to attract students to apply for the scholarship. However, selection cannot be based upon race/ ethnicity/ gender demographic criteria. This in-development project, the Husky PAWS Pathways for Academic Wellness and Success) program, will implement a unique adaptation of Yosso's Cultural Wealth Model [2] to elevate students' existing assets, with the goal of increasing retention, success indicators, and raising Pell-eligible students' graduation rates to non-Pell levels. The project will support students in engineering, computing, and physics majors by funding approximately six scholars each of the first three years. Scholars will receive annual scholarships ranging from $2,000 - $20,000 based on established criteria and unmet financial need - with options for one-time finishing scholarships as well. However, the anticipated applicant pool is over 1,000 eligible students. Thus, the first project challenge - beyond advertising the scholarships and recruiting applicants - is to refine appropriate application materials. To develop these application materials, a series of questions were proposed to inform the S-STEM team about additional indicators of financial need among students (such as experiencing food insecurity, experiencing the foster care system, etc.). However, the team acknowledged that some of these questions may alienate students. To address this concern, the criteria questions were refined, along with their framing language, through focus group feedback from existing Pell-eligible students on campus, to reduce the risk of alienating prospective students with whom we aim to build connections.

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.

“Internet memes” (“memes”) are a form of media communicating a thought or idea through some shared understanding. Memetic images are incredibly popular on social media platforms among a wide audience of users of varying identities. Their proliferance, popularity, and ability to be either easily understood or learned through examples makes them a viable format for idea transfer. These images often hide complex, abstract reasoning mechanisms behind their humorous front. This study examined the meaning-making of university learners viewing memetic images to explore if these meaning-making processes might be applicable and valuable to computer science educational contexts.

Analogy is a frequently leveraged pedagogical tool used across many disciplines, with computing being no exception. Computing education researchers, however, have raised concerns regarding the limitations of analogy. One obvious concern is the relevance of any given analogy to learners. Designing relevant analogies can greatly increase student engagement with the problem space by centering examples on their lived experiences. Relevant analogies can also facilitate learners in building appropriate connections as they explore novel concepts.

A concurrent computing course is filled with challenges for upper-level programming students. Understanding concurrency provides deeper insight into many modern computing and programming language behaviors, but the subject matter can be difficult even for relatively proficient students. It can be a challenge to help students navigate and understand these unfamiliar topics. While there is a difference in general programming familiarity, teaching this novel material is not unlike some challenges faced when engaging introductory students with first programming concepts.

Society's rapidly increasing reliance on technology has created urgency for future leaders to understand these technologies' potential impacts. News of technical and algorithmic concerns in society are frequent, highlighting the real impacts to real people.

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.

Concurrent programming can be a rewarding but challenging topic for computing students. Comprehending concurrency can help students gain a better understanding of the computer as a machine, and how processes within modern machines execute and interact. Knowledge of concurrency is important to develop secure and robust multithreaded programs. However, understanding this topic at a machine and syntactic level can be difficult for students due to its novelty and complexity. Several topics in concurrent computing can initially be explored at a high-level using real-world examples and analogies to facilitate comprehension. This paper explores perspectives provided by university students in a concurrent programming course on the use of analogy to facilitate learning about concurrent topics. Through this paper, we draw attention to analogies used in course examples and assignment prompts, while turning attention to how students interpret and reason about and with these. We also explore new analogies these students crafted while reasoning about the problem space. This exploration suggests that while these students may draw attention to different aspects (in different ways) of an analogy's design, they generally approach similar conclusions in their reasoning process provided the core relational design remains intact. Students also applied prior analogies from lecture and past assignments, actively reasoning during problem solving with these known examples. There is also some evidence of analogy mixing and swapping, suggesting malleability in analogy use while problem solving. Together, this exploration contributes to understanding student problem solving, reasoning behaviors, and perspectives while using analogy within concurrent computing courses.

Comics as a pedagogical tool have shown promise in conveying ideas and increasing retention in STEM disciplines. Within the context of introductory programming courses, the visual, real-world analogies to programming problems that comics offer may allow engineering students to better grasp abstract algorithmic concepts that can be obscured by low-level programming language details. Creating comics also provides an opportunity for students to exercise metacognition, as they are asked to reflect on what they know and how to express it in a new way. Further work is needed, however, to develop comic assignments with rigorous rubric-based assessment. Our work in progress focuses on an intervention where students develop their own algorithmic comics and share them with peers. The design of the assignment and assessment rubric leverages prior work on using context-bounded analogy to teach programming concepts. Students will create a comic illustrating an algorithmic concept and then use it as a medium for further communication, responding to peer feedback in order to further refine their understanding. These communications, we hypothesize, will increase correctness of representations and scenarios in the comics through refinement and likewise, in their understanding of programming concepts. The rubric associated with the assignment will serve as a model for assessment of relevant criteria within comic-based student activities.

Within computer science education research, analogy work has been relatively unexplored and in some cases, even discouraged. For a learning and reasoning tool that is so widely used in our discipline - from instructors and peer groups to the interfaces we encourage students to program on - it is beyond time to address the perception of analogy in our field.

In this work in progress/innovative practice paper, we describe our efforts to integrate introductory computer science pedagogical methods into an engineering fundamentals context. Our multidisciplinary team is addressing the problem of perceived value and applicability of programming for first-year engineering students. These students tend to be unaware of the importance of programming skills for practicing engineers within industry, and consequently display low interest in programming. We are working to address this perception problem through interventions in the engineering fundamentals classroom.Our interventions have three objectives: establish awareness of how programming skills can be generalized beyond the introductory classroom, incorporate targeted activities for algorithmic thinking, and demonstrate the practical applications of programming skills. Similar interventions are part of the introductory experience for our computer science students; our goal here is to tailor the interventions to an introductory engineering context. Our goal is for students to recognize computing as part of the career and identity of an engineer.

The CS1 classroom is filled with ideas that may be difficult for novice students. Flawed transfer and knowledge gaps appear in mistakes such as incorrect syntax. Students may recognize core ideas while details confuse them. Students must work through these problems to grow, but instructor intervention can assist appropriate restructuring of their mental models.

This position paper discusses the need for greater inclusion of context in papers describing computer science education research. This inspiration arose from our efforts to compare our experiences with pair programming in an introductory computer science course with experiences described in the literature. We quickly observed that the behaviors associated with the term "pair programming" and the contexts can differ greatly between universities and yet the phrase pair programming is often used with no further explanation.

Programming is becoming skill required by a wide range of students, not just CS majors. Furthermore, not only are non-CS majors learning to program, but many non-CS faculty find themselves teaching programming courses. Introducing these faculty and students to the craft of programming is accompanied by a number of unique challenges. How can non-CS faculty position themselves as programming experts, given they are not CS people? How can we convince non-CS students that coding is a necessary skill? Often our non-computing majors are reluctant, stating "Programming isn't what I signed up for!" Many non-CS students are not receptive to learning new programming languages due to a lack of intrinsic motivation coupled with technological anxiety. These factors often result in low-self efficacy, which must be overcome in order to explore, play, and learn. This Birds of a Feather discussion brings together instructors from diverse disciplines to discuss the teaching of programming to a range of students, the barriers that exist for non-computing students, and the interventions that attempt to mitigate these issues.

Multiple studies have shown that when novice and experienced programmers are enrolled in the same introductory programming course, the novice programmers are negatively impacted. We have two entry points into our course sequence for majors. One course is intended for students with little or no programming experience, while the alternate course is intended for students who have had previous programming experience. In 2015 we discovered that many students with programming experience were enrolling in the course for novice programmers. A change in our placement strategy in 2016 resulted in a greater portion of the students with programming experience actually enrolled in the course intended for students with programming experience. Last year we reported on the impact this change had on the courses and the students enrolled in these introductory courses. Although student performance improved only slightly, many fewer students with little or no previous programming experience reported that their first programming course was unreasonably difficult in 2016. In this paper we examine how this change in placement strategy and resulting changes in the courses is impacting student persistence in the major. Initial indications are that a greater percentage of students with little or no previous programming experience are persisting in their computing major when these students begin in an introductory course that does not also include students who have substantial programming experience.

Studies have shown that novice programmers face unnecessary obstacles when they are enrolled in an introductory course alongside students with previous programming experience. Thus a recommended best practice is to have separate courses or separate sections for novice and experienced students in introductory programming courses. At Michigan Tech we have two starting points for our introductory sequence with one aimed at novice programmers and a second aimed at students with some programming experience. We, therefore, assumed that the curriculum was in alignment with this best practice. A survey of our incoming students indicated that students were not enrolling in the courses consistent with our expectations. By changing the timing and means of offering an assessment to determine student placement in the introductory sequence, we were able to substantially impact the make-up of our introductory courses. The change did have the desired positive impact on students in the course for novice programmers. In this paper, we will also discuss some of the other issues we uncovered with this change.