This is a place to foster a growing community of computing educators around teaching in prison – for those who are interested in possibly doing this in the future, and those with plans or experience doing so. Higher education in prison (HEP) has expanded rapidly in the U.S. over the past several years after a policy change that re-instated pell grant eligibility to incarcerated adults. This follows a global shift toward more rehabilitative, as opposed to punitive, strategies toward criminal justice as more countries recognize the wide-ranging benefits to all members of society. However, computing education, as well as basic digital literacy, remain a challenge as various factors like technology infrastructure, perceived threats to security, and instructor willingness remain challenges to offering CS courses in prison education programs. Despite these barriers, there are several models of CS education happening in prison today including in-person and virtual instruction, for-credit college courses and informal workshops. In this session, we will talk about different ways of getting started with teaching in prison, as well as practical strategies for navigating challenges from our own personal experience of teaching CS in prison settings.

Coming together as a broader community of CS education researchers and practitioners is an opportunity to gather for critical conversations that can benefit from our diversity of lived experiences and knowledge. We propose a space where we can reflect on the question: What do you think people assume about you based on your race as a computer scientist? This is intended to be offered in addition to important spaces in our conference gatherings where people gather based on shared racial experiences – especially those underrepresented in computing. This would be a place where we can build empathy for experiences of others, as well, as well as a dedicated time to reflect on our own racialized experiences. This session is meant to spark dialogue, encourage listening, and allow participants to see how race-based assumptions show up in computing education. By surfacing these experiences, the goal is to raise awareness and think about ways we can support one another and create more inclusive spaces in the field.

Incarcerated students face profound barriers to learning computer science: restricted internet access, limited technology, and highly constrained peer interaction. In this environment, the learning management system (LMS) becomes not only a tool but a central site for teaching, collaboration, and meaning-making. This poster presents a quantitative LMS trace analysis of a Winter 2025 computer architecture course taught in a California prison, examining how teaching presence (professor/TA facilitation and response timing) related to discussion board activity, LMS page views, and grade outcomes through the lens of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. Using Canvas API exports of discussion board content, page views, and grades, we analyzed participation counts by role, thread depth, staff response times, and correlations between engagement and final percentage. We extend prior work by providing quantitative and temporal visualizations of participation, summarizing posting patterns across the 10-week course. We also report preliminary indicators of message content characteristics and clarify our protocol for distinguishing staff and student contributions. While these analyses represent a single cohort, they offer early evidence that timely teaching presence may support engagement in constrained environments and suggest directions for broader application in online, hybrid, and other resource-limited CS courses.

Recent work has shown that incarcerated adult students reported a decrease in confidence in their ability to do well in the course as the course progressed, whereas non-incarcerated students in a traditional educational setting reported an increase in confidence over time on the same measure. Given these differences in student experiences between incarcerated adult students and traditional students, this work seeks to further understand the experiences of incarcerated adult in CS1, with a focus on their attitudes towards computing. Specifically, we used the Computing Attitude Survey (CAS) as a pre/post measurement in a CS1 course taught in prison. We found significant positive shifts for Problem Solving - Transfer and Fixed Mindset factors and a slight decrease for Real-World Connections. We additionally compare the results of the CAS survey between the incarcerated adult students in this study and those of non-incarcerated students reported in prior work.

Culturally Relevant Computing (CRC) has been shown to have positive effects on students, including increased classroom engagement, increased computing interest, and increased math performance. However, the vast majority of CRC studies take place in primary and secondary education, with little known about its efficacy in higher education. Despite the lack of literature on CRC in higher education, we believe that there may be CRC techniques presently being implemented in this context---yet not published in the research community. To investigate, we interviewed 21 professors from Hispanic Serving Institutions within the Computing Alliance for Hispanic Serving Institutions to document their implementation (if any) of CRC in the higher education context. Professors reported several CRC implementations including, but not limited to, culture in course materials, language-based approaches, providing opportunities outside the classroom, cultural sharing, and professional development. We conclude by discussing how these results may contribute to the promotion of leveraging students' cultures in higher education to serve students---particularly of minoritized backgrounds in computing.

In this discussion, we seek to create a space for computing educators interested in teaching in prisons. Recent policy changes are leading to a growing number of higher education institutions providing programs in prison to combat the national crisis of mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts already marginalized groups. Within the computing education community, we see an opportunity for several mutual benefits through our increased involvement in these programs including: a) providing computing courses in prisons, where STEM education opportunities are severely lacking, b) increasing diverse perspectives by bringing justice-impacted people into computing, and c) gaining experience and improving known methods in effective CS education in settings with low-technology infrastructure, for adult and non-traditional students, and for students from diverse backgrounds. All discussion leaders have experience in and/or plans to teach CS in a college-in-prison program. No experience is required, and we welcome all members of the community interested in learning more about these opportunities.

Understanding incarcerated adult (IA) students' fears upon entering a CS1 course and how their confidence changes throughout the course can help us understand how well IA students' fears are being addressed, and help future instructors of CS1 in prison address them better. Building on recent work on non-CS majors' fears and confidence in introductory CS, we surveyed 45 IA students across two offerings of a CS1 course in prison on their fears going into the course, and confidence in their ability to succeed. We present a phenomenographic analysis of fears amongst IA students in CS1, and analyze relationships between these fears and change in confidence. In addition, we compare the fears expressed by IA students to those of non-CS majors from prior work. Findings include many IA students reporting no fears, but an overall decrease in confidence across both offerings of the course which was mostly accounted for by students who did express initial fears. We found 9 fears overlapping with those found in a prior study outside of the prison context (e.g., getting a bad grade), and 7 fears only identified in our study (e.g., interference from circumstances beyond my control).

Higher education in prisons offers life-changing benefits to incarcerated populations. In many countries including the US, computing education is currently rare in prisons which lack technology infrastructure. My work aims to identify strategies and solutions for teaching CS in prison environments, and broadening participation in computing amongst incarcerated adults.

Higher education is expanding in United States prisons, with a growing demand for STEM offerings. Academics from other disciplines have stressed the importance of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in prison higher education, and computing in context has shown major benefits in CS1--- especially for women and nontraditional students. More work is needed to determine what contexts are relevant to incarcerated college students, and how to incorporate these into computing curricula. In this paper, we build on prior work on computing in context and culturally relevant techniques in computing. We analyze course data from a CS1 course taught in a college-in-prison program to answer the following research question: What contexts do incarcerated students in CS1 find relevant? We identify 24 topics pursued by students across 78 open-ended programming assignment submissions, the three most popular being business management, sports statistics, and physical health. These results offer insight into potential contexts that are meaningful to incarcerated college students to be incorporated into future computing curricula and interventions in prisons.

Efforts to bring incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals into the field of computing stand to improve equitable access to both computing jobs, and consequently the benefits of our tools and innovations through the inclusion of more diverse perspectives. This report describes the design and execution of a college level introductory computing course conducted with 26 students currently incarcerated at a prison in the United States in Fall 2022. We discuss the ways that the prison environment and the student body differ from traditional college computing classes, and how this impacted the design and execution of the course. We found that despite significant environmental barriers to learning to program, such as not having access to a code interpreter, there were unique affordances of the student population, including maturity and community, that could be leveraged in the course design and policies. We conclude with many lessons learned for the purpose of improving future offerings of computing courses in prisons.

Background and Context. Live coding is a teaching method in which an instructor dynamically writes code in front of students in an effort to impart skills such as incremental development and debugging. By contrast, traditional, static-code examples typically involve an instructor annotating or explaining components of pre-written code. Despite recommendations to use live coding and a wealth of qualitative analyses that identify perceived learning benefits of it, there are a lack of empirical evaluations to confirm those learning benefits, especially with respect to students’ programming processes.

Online discussion boards, designed to facilitate learning from peers and instructors in an accessible space, are a vital part of course design, especially in large scale computer science classes. Previous work has shown that women in computer science tend to use anonymity more often than men on these boards, a trend not found in humanities, social science or business courses. In this work, we build on these findings using an intersectional lens, analyzing both gender and race/ethnicity. We find this combined analysis reveals differences in anonymity that are not apparent when examining gender alone. For example, we find a significantly greater difference in anonymity use between Hispanic men and women than would be expected from analyzing race/ethnicity and gender independently. We additionally analyze type of content (e.g., questions, answers), course, platform, and data source to characterize the many factors at play in measuring students’ choice to participate anonymously. In doing so, we show that different approaches used in prior work for eliciting information on gender — whether using registrar data, a survey, or imputing gender based on name — changes how over of students are classified, particularly affecting nonbinary students and Asian students. Understanding when students participate anonymously can help educators and platform designers to make students’ experience of online discussion boards more welcoming.

Live coding---a pedagogical technique in which an instructor plans, writes, and executes code in front of a class---is generally considered a best practice when teaching programming. However, only a few studies have evaluated the effect of live coding on student learning in a controlled experiment and most of the literature relating to live coding identifies students' perceived benefits of live-coding examples. In order to empirically evaluate the impact of live coding, we designed a controlled experiment in a CS1 course taught in Python at a large public university. In the two remote lecture sections for the course, one was taught using live-coding examples and the other was taught using static-code examples. Throughout the term, we collected code snapshots from students' programming assignments, students' grades, and the questions that they asked during the remote lectures. We then applied a set of process-oriented programming metrics to students' programming data to compare students' adherence to effective programming processes in the two learning groups and categorized each question asked in lectures following an open-coding approach. Our results revealed a general lack of difference between the two groups across programming processes, grades, and lecture questions asked. However, our experiment uncovered minimal effects in favor of the live-coding group indicating improved programming processes but lower performance on assignments and grades. Our results suggest an overall insignificant impact of the style of presenting code examples, though we reflect on the threats to validity in our study that should be addressed in future work.

Previous research has been devoted to improving the experience of non-majors in introductory CS courses. In this study, we compare the experiences of non-majors in two different introductory CS courses, specifically with respect to fears about taking the course and change in confidence levels. CS0 is a computing course intentionally designed for non-majors, and CS1 is a more traditional introductory computing course. Both of these courses were composed primarily of non-majors and were taught by the same instructor. Survey data was collected from 124 students enrolled in CS0, and 502 students enrolled in CS1. Through qualitative analysis, we found that the fears of non-major students entering both of these introductory CS courses fell into one or more of nine distinct categories (e.g., Coding, Perceiving STEM as Difficult, Managing Workload). Additionally, using students' confidence levels at the beginning and end of the courses, we found that students in CS0 had a greater increase in confidence level than those in CS1. Finally, we explored connections between students' fears and how their confidence changed by the end of the course. We found that students across both courses with fears related to coding, lack of preparation, and being left behind had the highest average increase in confidence levels.