In computing classrooms, building an open-ended programming project engages students in the process of designing and implementing an idea of their own choice. An explicit planning process has been shown to help students build more complex and ambitious open-ended projects. However, novices encounter difficulties in exploring and creatively expressing ideas during planning. We present Idea Builder, a storyboarding-based planning system to help novices visually express their ideas. Idea Builder includes three features: 1) storyboards to help students express a variety of ideas that map easily to programming code, 2) animated example mechanics with example actors to help students explore the space of possible ideas supported by the programming environments, and 3) synthesized starter code to help students easily transition from planning to programming. Through two studies with high school coding workshops, we found that students self-reported as feeling creative and feeling easy to communicate ideas; having access to animated example mechanics of an actor help students to build those actors in their plans and projects; and that most students perceived the synthesized starter code from Idea Builder as helpful and time-saving.

Background and Context: Open-ended programming projects encourage novice students to choose and pursue projects based on their own ideas and interests, and are widely used in many introductory programming courses. However, novice programmers encounter challenges exploring and discovering new ideas, implementing their ideas, and applying unfamiliar programming concepts and APIs. Code examples are one of the primary resources students use to apply code usage patterns and learn API knowledge, but little work has investigated the effect of having access to examples on students’ open-ended programming experience.

Many students rely on examples when learning to program, but they often face barriers when incorporating these examples into their own code and learning the concepts they present. As a step towards designing effective example interfaces that can support student learning, we investigate novices' needs and strategies when using examples to write code. We conducted a study with 12 pairs of high school students working on open-ended game design projects, using a system that allows students to browse examples based on their functionality, and to view and copy the example code. We analyzed interviews, screen recordings, and log data, identifying 5 moments when novices request examples, and 4 strategies that arise when students use examples. We synthesize these findings into principles that can inform the design of future example systems to better support students.

The current CS for All movement reflects a need to provide opportunities for every person to learn computer science, as a matter of equity. Many computing professionals have a desire to contribute to society; since access to computing education is limited in many ways, finding ways to use computing to give back is particularly valuable. In this Birds of a Feather, we will discuss strategies for individual students, faculty, and institutions to develop and lead efforts focused on improving inclusion, equity, and diversity in computing. Exemplary efforts that computing students, faculty, and computing professionals have used to broaden participation include mentoring, tutoring, K12 outreach, expanded research opportunities, and service learning. In this BoF, we invite participants to seek and share resources that can lower the barriers to engaging in outreach and research for broadening participation in computing. We will also discuss strategies for choosing projects that leverage local resources and opportunities, promote personal professional development, and contribute to institutional improvement.

Computing-infused lessons serve as a way to provide all K-12 stu- dents with computer science learning opportunities. Positioning high school interns as curricular co-creators with K-12 teachers can help to create more engaging lessons. I examine the quality and impact of these co-created computing infused lessons.

Our researchers seek to support students in building block-based programming projects that are motivating and engaging as well as valuable practice in learning to code. A difficult part of the programming process is planning. In this research, we explore how novice programmers used a custom-built planning tool, PlanIT, contrasted against how they used storyboarding when planning games. In a three-part study, we engaged novices in planning and programming three games: a maze game, a break-out game, and a mashup of the two. In a set of five case studies, we show how five pairs of students approached the planning and programming of these three games, illustrating that students felt more creative when storyboarding rather than using PlanIT. We end with a discussion on the implications of this work for designing supports for novices to plan open-ended projects.

By age 15 girls start to lose interest in STEM, and less than 50% consider a STEM-related career. Providing hands-on internship opportunities has been one of the leading ways to help connect students with exploring computing careers; however, these opportunities are limited in high school. We propose a framework for a university-led high school internship initiative that focuses on service learning, co-design, and the propagation of engaging computing curricula for younger audiences. We piloted this model virtually in summer 2021, with high school students and teachers as interns mentored by university role models. Teams led the development and implementation of computing-infused curricula for a virtual summer coding camp. In this article, we share our framework and review the importance of service-learning for recruiting diverse participants and the use of co-design as a way to broker relationships between developers and community stakeholders. Additionally, we provide preliminary outcomes of our internship model on student and teacher participants gathered from qualitative data including end-of-summer presentations and post-program interviews.

Academic computing departments are seeking ways to broaden participation in computing (BPC), and many are encouraging individual faculty, staff, and students to attend diversity-oriented conferences, like the Tapia and STARS Celebrations of Diversity in Computing and Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. The purpose of the STARS Ignite Workshop is to provide faculty and staff with a framework including the tools and knowledge needed to make such conference attendance beneficial both to the students attending the conference and to the sponsoring faculty and their department. In this workshop, participants will learn to recruit and lead a BPC purpose-driven student conference cohort and the implementation of a BPC event or program. Participants will be provided with opportunities to adapt sample materials (recruitment emails, applications, etc.) to their own needs, assess the BPC needs at their institutions, and learn how to determine if their BPC efforts are successful. A laptop and Google account are required for this event. Interested attendees should be willing to commit to leading a student conference cohort to a diversity-oriented computing conference and then implementing a BPC event or program with these students.

We compare subject area block-based programming lessons made by two participant groups new to creating K-12 computing curricula. The first group consists of 29 high school interns with prior programming experience but not formal pedagogical training. The second group consists of 86 teachers who attended an infusing computing professional development, with formal pedagogical training but no background in programming. We examine a total of 113 lessons for their use of scaffolding, teacher accessibility, equity, and computing and subject area content. Our analysis extends prior work showing novice-student creator strength in conveying content knowledge and difficulty in incorporating equity into coding lessons. Compared to lessons created by the teacher group (less coding, more pedagogical experience), our results show that teachers also struggle with including equitable practices and opportunity for culturally responsive and identify affirming activities. However, they were much stronger in including assessment focused items. Furthermore, teachers were able to provide adequate support for coding and content knowledge. Our exploration of scaffolding included in these lessons shows that scaffolding included differs by creator and that projects involving worked examples were more often correlated to more evidence of equitable practices. Through this research, we gain insight into what additional knowledge and training are needed to help creators make higher quality and more accessible computing lessons for non-computer science courses.

The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is a CS Principles (CSP) course created at UC Berkeley to reach high school and university non-majors in computer science. It was chosen for the CSP pilot and endorsed by the College Board as an AP CSP curriculum and PD provider since the first AP CSP exam sitting in 2017. In this workshop, we will provide an overview of the BJC curriculum including course materials, teacher resources, and an introduction to Snap!, the chosen visual programming language of BJC. We will not only cover curriculum updates, Snap! updates, BJC for middle school, BJC in other languages, but also dive into labs with hands-on programming. Some of our experienced BJC Lead Teachers will provide support and answer questions based on personal classroom experience. This workshop is intended to be an introduction and update to the Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum (bjc.edc.org) and community. This is not intended to be an in-depth experience, but an overview. Note: It is recommended to use least a Chromebook during the workshop in order to achieve the learning outcomes. Also, having Multiple/dual monitors will make for a better experience.

Academic computing departments are seeking ways to broaden participation, and many are encouraging individual faculty, staff, and students to attend diversity-oriented conferences, like the Tapia and STARS Celebrations of Diversity in Computing and Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Such conferences present opportunities to meet a broader community of people for professional development and networking, to be inspired by leaders in computing, and to celebrate diversity. However, while many institutions sponsor these conferences and support individual student attendance, students may not know how to leverage these opportunities effectively. We argue that leading a cohort of faculty/staff and students who attend a conference with the shared goal of broadening participation can provide lasting benefits for computing departments. This workshop will prepare faculty and staff to recruit and lead a team of students and leverage conference attendance to ignite broadening participation efforts. Through a hands-on collaborative process, the workshop provides the knowledge and tools needed to successfully lead a cohort, and helps attendees tailor the provided tools to their local strengths and needs to broaden participation in computing.

Project-based learning can encourage and motivate students to learn through exploring their own interests, but introduces special challenges for novice programmers. Recent research has shown that novice students perceive themselves to be "bad at programming, especially when they do not know how to start writing a program, or need to create a plan before getting started. In this paper, we present PlanIT, a guided planning tool integrated with the Snap! programming environment designed to help novices plan and program their open-ended projects. Within PlanIT, students can add a description for their project, use a to do list to help break down the steps of implementation, plan important elements of their program including actors, variables, and events, and view related example projects. We report findings from a pilot study of high school students using PlanIT, showing that students who used the tool learned to make more specific and actionable plans. Results from student interviews show they appreciate the guidance that PlanIT provides, as well as the affordances it offers to more quickly create program elements.

In this poster, I examine a two-pronged, female-oriented, high school computing outreach program, FLAMES, incorporating 1) workshops throughout the school year and 2) an 8-week high school summer intern program run within the Game2Learn lab at North Carolina State University. I focus on examining the effects of the program on students' skills and affect towards computing. Literature has shown that socially relevant themes in computing are engaging for women and underrepresented minorities. Students understanding how these themes connect to computer science helps broaden their view of computing and increases their interest in pursuing a computing career. This initiative uses socially relevant themes, specifically around the context of developing educational tools and block-based programming activities for use in K-12 classrooms. High school students were trained to assist North and South Carolina teachers with the development of Computational Thinking-infused curricula for their science, math, English, and social studies classrooms. Additionally, summer students assisted in research labs alongside undergraduate researchers, aiding in field study observations, software testing, and data classification. This poster presents the design of the program, an overview of the curriculum, and results including both student and teacher feedback. Results show that the outreach program has benefited each of the parties involved, including its student participants, researchers, and the teachers assisted by the participants. I share lessons learned from this experience in order to help other CS departments develop similar broadening participation in computing programs.

This paper illustrates coding decisions by in-service teachers and high school interns working independently versus collaboratively to build computing activities for non-computing classrooms. We investigate code written in Snap! to gain insights on project type and subject matter. We also share case studies on how intern collaboration influences final product execution. Through our research, we found student-only teams often created tutorial projects whereas teachers-only teams create interactive narratives. We found students were able to reuse code across projects to replicate similar mechanics and that students specialize in different aspects of project creation. Overall, we find it beneficial to have collaborative teacher-student teams.

Many K-12 CS education instructors are new to teaching computing and use block-based programming (BBP), allowing them and their students to learn computing concepts with less frustration. Based on prior work with instructors, we found that they need assistance with grading student projects as they are new to coding and developing corresponding assessments. Existing methods are either not intuitive and too restrictive for custom assignments, or tediously unnecessary. Additionally, providing a grading support tool will help increase adoption of our Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles curriculum. Therefore, we began developing a tool to assist teachers with grading BBP projects. This paper reports on a modified User Experience Research method, which we used to determine the critical and necessary features needed for the tool to allow teachers to successfully and efficiently assess BBP student artifacts.

In summer 2018, we conducted two week-long professional development workshops for 116 middle and high school teachers interested in infusing computational thinking (CT) into their classrooms. Teachers learned to program in Snap!, connect CT to their disciplines, and create infused CT learning segments for their classes. This paper investigates the extent to which teachers were able to successfully infuse CT skills of pattern recognition, abstraction, decomposition, and algorithms into their learning products.

Computational Thinking (CT) is being infused into curricula in a variety of core K-12 STEM courses. As these topics are being introduced to students without prior programming experience and are potentially taught by instructors unfamiliar with programming and CT, appropriate lesson design might help support both students and teachers. "Use-Modify-Create" (UMC), a CT lesson progression, has students ease into CT topics by first "Using" a given artifact, "Modifying" an existing one, and then eventually "Creating" new ones. While studies have presented lessons adopting and adapting this progression and advocating for its use, few have focused on evaluating UMC's pedagogical effectiveness and claims. We present a comparison study between two CT lesson progressions for middle school science classes. Students participated in a 4-day activity focused on developing an agent-based simulation in a block-based programming environment. While some classrooms had students develop code on days 2-4, others used a scaffolded lesson plan modeled after the UMC framework. Through analyzing student's exit tickets, classroom observations, and teacher interviews, we illustrate differences in perception of assignment difficulty from both the students and teachers, as well as student perception of artifact "ownership" between conditions.