This Birds of a Feather will begin with a high-level overview of the SIGCSE Reads 2024 books and then quickly move to discussion about mentoring students in the era of large language models and ChatGPT, including how students may value the curriculum differently, how learning outcomes may change, and how we can support students and alumni/ae as they work with rapidly changing job and learning expectations. We expect that many of the sessions at SIGCSE will address the radical shifts in learning outcomes and curricular changes due to LLMs. We will not focus on the particulars of these changes, but rather on mentoring in this time with Sister Resisters: Mentoring Black Women on Campus by Janie Victoria Ward and Tracy L. Robinson-Wood as a resource. How do we guide our students through the curriculum upheaval triggered by shifting learning outcomes? How do we help them prepare for the new instantiation of computer science?

This workshop aims to help individuals expand their engagement with the computer science education research community as inclusive and equitable peer reviewers. Peer reviewers are liaisons between a journal or funding organization and members of their professional community, and thus are crucial for incorporating equity as part of the culture of computer science and engineering education. Prior research has shown that being a peer reviewer has benefits for the reviewer as well as the journal. Peer reviewing journal articles and proposals is a good way to stay current with what is happening in the field and acquire insights that can improve one's own writing and research. Peer reviewing is also a way to promote equity in our community through inclusive practices. Inclusive reviewing practices provide respectful, constructive feedback to authors on aspects of their manuscripts and proposals such as bias-free language, treatment of vulnerable populations, and positionality of authors and reviewers. This workshop (supported by NSF grants EEC-2037807, 2037788, and 2037797) prompts participants to consider their own positionality as reviewers and scholars. From this perspective, they then consider important aspects of an article or proposal such as whether underserved communities are impacted by the work, if participant identities are referred to appropriately, if authors of color working in this space are being cited appropriately, and if authors are being accountable to do the challenging work of addressing issues related to diversity and equity.

This special session furthers the work associated with SIGCSE Reads and the growing community of SIGCSE members who connect to each other through science fiction. This session extends the experiences of earlier sessions by addressing the global and cultural experiences that our students will face in the computing profession through examining works of fiction. The work of the special session will involve diving into the cultural context of this year's SIGCSE Reads stories with discussion about how this experience can be translated to the classroom, with the goal of better preparing students to consider their computing degrees and careers in a pluralistic, global, equitable and just context.

This workshop aims to help individuals write constructive and insightful reviews for scholarly work in engineering education research while considering aspects of diversity, equity and inclusion in the work. The topic, goal and activities of this workshop align with the conference theme of "Grand Challenges in Engineering Education" as it will help participants identify and overcome the challenges involved with equitable and inclusive peer review practices in engineering education research.

As a field, engineering education research (EER) draws from multiple disciplines and geographic regions. This presents challenges in the process of peer reviewing EER manuscripts, as peer reviewers typically do not receive formal training in critiquing research publications. We investigated how EER scholars develop an understanding of how to conduct peer reviews of manuscripts related to engineering education. We draw from theories of cognition and schema development to address the following question: What aspects of EER manuscripts are reviewers paying attention to, and how do these aspects differ for reviewers from different geographic regions?The context for this study was a mentored peer reviewer program, which pairs less experienced reviewers (mentees) with experienced reviewers (mentors) to review a set of manuscripts. Participants (n=27: nine mentors and 18 mentees) from six countries and varied levels of expertise were organized into triads (one mentor and two mentees). Each triad collaboratively evaluated each manuscript, crafted feedback to authors and formulated recommendations to journal editors. Data collected from participants included Structured Peer Reviews (SPR) that prompted participants to comment on the main strengths and weaknesses of a short EER manuscript and formulate a recommendation to the editor. All participants completed SPRs for one manuscript prior to the program (Pre-SPR) and a second manuscript at the end of the program (Post-SPR). SPRs were coded and categorized into six themes: context, methods, results, discussion, mechanics, and EER relevance. Themes were categorized into codes related to positive or negative assessments.The preliminary analysis presented in this paper focuses on the extent to which reviewers converged in the breadth of what they commented on in the pre- and post-SPR forms. Results were compared based on where participants earned their doctorate. Differences between participants from different geographic regions emerged in the Pre-SPR data but were minimal in the post-SPR. This research provides a foundation for considering peer review as a form of professional development as findings suggest that training affects reviewers’ understanding of EER scholarship.

This special session furthers the work associated with SIGCSE Reads and the growing community of SIGCSE members who connect to each other through science fiction. This session extends the experiences of earlier sessions by incorporating a new ethical framework, capability ethics, that supports analysis at a societal level rather than a personal level. Updated materials will be available so that the exercise can be translated to other classrooms. Building on an initial description of ethical frameworks and how they have been used with earlier SIGCSE Reads stories, the exercise will be followed by discussion about new stories that provide additional challenges to both teachers and students, with the goal of better preparing students to consider their computing degrees and careers in a pluralistic, global, equitable and just context.

Building on known best practices, this paper describes a newly implemented project-based curriculum for undergraduate computer science majors. The program, designed to provide all students the known benefits of the project-based approach, is being implemented in a context that focuses heavily on drawing students of color, women, and other underrepresented groups into STEM careers. Our Fall 2021 upper-division entering student cohort is 70% female and 80% people of color. Our new computer science program builds on our strong and internationally recognized track record in applying project-based learning (PBL) in engineering. We believe our PBL CS program to be the first program of its type in North America. Key components of the program are: project-based learning across multiple courses in the upper-division, project-based learning within lower-division courses, straightforward articulation with regional and national community colleges that are minority serving institutions (MSIs), industry and research connections that drive projects, and vertical integration of teams across upper-division semesters. Core to this is a commitment to addressing access and equity issues. The foundation for the new upper-division program is a revamped lower-division core curriculum that also feeds into the information technology and information systems majors offered at our school. The core curriculum is designed to reduce barriers to a degree in computing while encouraging more students to explore a degree in the math-intensive computer science program. This curricula initiative paper describes the curriculum, the supporting theory, implementation challenges, and current outcomes.

This special session aims to engage the audience in a conversation about integrated engineering, a transdisplinary approach to engineering. Participants will learn about the Integrated Engineering programs at Minnesota State University, Mankato (USA), the University of San Diego (USA), and University College London (UK). In an interactive session, participants will discuss the concept of integrated engineering and how it might apply to their programs and students. We hope this will establish a foundation for the community to continue discussion of integrated engineering as an emerging description of engineering learning and practice.

This special session furthers the work associated with SIGCSE Reads and the growing community of SIGCSE members who connect to each other through science fiction. The goal of this session is to provide a practical experience addressing one of the five common goals presented previously: a learning experience for participants in how science fiction can be used in computing classrooms to teach ethics and develop CS students' facility for considering ethical situations with deeper critical thinking. Materials will be available so that the exercise can be translated to other classrooms. By providing this experience in a virtual format, participants will be able to translate it to their own setting, whether virtual or face-to-face. Building on an initial description of ethical frameworks, the exercise will be followed by discussion about ways to adapt, adjust and modify the exercise to incorporate other fictional works, to fit into a variety of courses, or to address different levels of learners.

Iron Range Engineering is an award-winning, project-based, upper-division engineering program. Its educational model has been propagated to two different implementations that meet different regional and student needs. There is evidence of student success as the model moves from start-up mode to sustainable programs in different settings. A key motivator for the model and its program is increasing access to engineering education by supporting students who transfer from two-year colleges, broadening the participation of underrepresented and first-generation (first in their families to attend college) students in engineering.

This special session furthers the work associated with SIGCSE Reads and the growing community of SIGCSE members who connect to each other through science fiction. The session starts with a practical experience addressing one of the five common goals presented previously: a learning experience for participants in how science fiction can be used in computing classrooms to teach ethics and develop CS students' facility for considering ethical situations with deeper critical thinking. Materials will be available so that the exercise can be translated to other classrooms. This will be followed by a significant Q & A session with one of this year's authors, Hugo Award winner David D. Levine, whose short story "Damage" addresses questions of ethical decision making by an AI.

Work in Progress: When we talk about inclusion, we often neglect geographic constraints. Akin to a food desert, education deserts exist in the United States and affect the participation of students in higher education. Accessing an engineering education program is not always possible for placebound students if they are far from engineering programs, even if nearby community colleges support lower division training. This paper presents information about where the engineering education deserts are in the United States and seeks to broaden the conversation about access to engineering degrees. There are both lower-division and upper-division deserts, but community colleges expand the availability of engineering education in ways that are not always studied and are sometimes dismissed. This work-in-progress paper highlights an initial investigation of this issue and presents the early stages of an innovative curriculum that addresses the challenge of providing access to upper-division engineering learning for all prepared students.

This special session will allow discussion of how many common goals of CS educators (conveying core CS concepts, creating community for our students, discussing ethics, etc.) can be furthered through the use of literature in CS courses. We will present five goals which are common in CS education, and discuss how incorporating literature relates to them. We will present small case studies showing concrete examples of assignments and courses which have successfully utilized literature in common, core CS courses. We will showcase a Q & A with author Naomi Kritzer, winner of the 2016 Hugo Award for her short story "Cat Pictures Please".

Telling our lived stories and listening to others' stories are part of how we make sense of our lives and build our communities. It is no wonder that stories hold us in such thrall and have power in our relationships and organizations. Both listening to and telling stories are important skills for engineering educators and change agents at any career stage. We also have to learn how to nudge the stories towards the improved future we know can occur. Before we can redirect the stories in our organizations as part of making change happen, we have to learn how to identify, and build meaning from, the stories we hear. This special session builds on data from our active research study of systemic curricular change origins as well as the work of others to demonstrate techniques to nudge stories. Every member of the FIE community, regardless of their institution or job title, is a potential change agent for improving CSET education and needs opportunities to continue building their skill sets. In this special session, we offer a portion of this training in an interactive, hands-on manner within the safe environment of FIE.

Project-based learning is a form of active learning where large-scale projects provide context for technical learning. Along with background information, this paper examines teaching and learning of signals and systems in the context of two ABET accredited project-based learning programs. Examples of projects, deep learning activities and classroom activities are provided.

This interactive workshop uses the metaphor of a baseball team to illustrate the variety of people-roles involved in making educational improvements happen, as well as the academic ecosystem in which these changes occur. When making smaller-scale changes, the members may be more loosely structured like an informal sandlot team, though core roles still need to be fulfilled. Larger-scale changes may require visible change champions with different specialities, such as managing and coaching staff, and a team maintaining the stadium. This workshop looks at the broad scope of individuals necessary to field a team of change champions and helps participants build their own “roster” and “scouting” processes, whether their current (or envisioned) change is big, small, or somewhere in between. Everyone interested in changing engineering education is welcome. You do not need to have a “big idea” or a team to be part of this workshop1.

Have you read any of the common reads for SIGCSE 2017? Now's your chance to talk about them! Two novels: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Babbage: The Mostly True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua (Pantheon Graphic Novels, 2015) and The Martian by Andy Weir (Broadway Books, 2014) as well as a short story: "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov (Science Fiction Quarterly, 1956) were proposed at the end of the 2016 conference. If you're interested in science fiction, whether on a personal, academic, or pedagogical level, come join us in this BoF and discuss one or more of the two books and short story. We'll provide potential topics and discussion questions targeting how to incorporate these books into a CS course, but the discussion will be open. The BoF will close with a discussion of potential books for the 2018 conference.

Efforts have been made to improve technical and professional skills in engineering graduates, but little widespread change in pedagogy has occurred within U.S. engineering education institutions. Our group studied the genesis and implementation of an innovative engineering curriculum (Iron Range Engineering) through a series of interviews with a wide range of stakeholders. Using a grounded theory approach, we found that to “shoehorn” an innovative curriculum into a traditional university setting required ad hoc solutions - almost akin to hacking a system. The findings in the study of this process also showed that the most common barriers to widespread educational innovation can be framed as credentialing issues, whether as excuses for not implementing change or as legitimate obstacles. At the root of the credentialing issue is the ubiquitous standard unit of effort-the credit hour, which was originally designed simply to measure faculty workload rather than student learning. This paper seeks to describe the breadth of credentialing in terms of scope and groups involved. Finally, we propose conversations that change agents in CSET education can use to turn credentialing into a lever for systemic curricular transformation.

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Speech recognition and natural language processing are interesting and relevant applications of many CS principles. Unfortunately, the barrier to entry for using existing tools is quite high, often requiring many hours installing, compiling, testing, and debugging tools before students can even begin exploring the technical concepts. The "Speech Recognition Virtual Kitchen" environment is an NSF-sponsored collaborative research infrastructure project that has the goals to promote community sharing of research techniques, foster innovative experimentation, and provide solid reference systems as a tool for education, research, and evaluation. The core of the research infrastructure is the use of virtual machines (VMs) that provide a consistent experimental environment. We liken the virtual machines to a "kitchen" because they provide the infrastructure into which one can install "appliances" (e.g., speech recognition tool-kits), "recipes" (scripts for creating state-of-the art systems), and "ingredients" (language data). A web-based community platform allows physically disconnected users to jointly explore VMs, learn from each other, and collaborate in research. This demo will provide an overview of available VMs, suggestions for use in undergraduate and graduate computer science courses and capstone projects, and a demonstration of our teaching VM, highlighting the ease of working with available tools. We invite participation in our community through downloading and uploading VMs, which can be an entry to open-source software development. More information can be found at speechkitchen.org.

Have you read any of the common reads for SIGCSE 2016? Now's your chance to talk about them! Two books: The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Primer by Neal Stephenson (Bantam Spectra, 1995) and Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Orbit, 2013) as well as two short stories: "A Logic Named Joe" by Will F. Jenkins (Street and Smith, 1946) and "Seven Years from Home" by Naomi Novik (Clarksworld Magazine, 2014) were proposed at the end of the 2015 conference. If you're interested in science fiction, whether on a personal, academic, or pedagogical level, come join us in this BoF and discuss one or more of the two books and two stories. We'll provide potential topics and discussion questions targeting how to incorporate these books into a CS course, but the discussion will be open. The BoF will close with a discussion of potential books for the 2017 conference.

Engineering and Computer Science (E&CS) Education is an emerging discipline and is a subset of the larger field of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education. E&CS Education has a relatively brief history, and many individuals who are not directly involved in the discipline are often confused about its purpose. In this special session, we will use up to two background stories to frame the larger questions around E&CS Education goals and help draw the conversation from practice to philosophy while creating a safe space for open conversation addressing issues of change in our discipline.

Four years of student feedback from participants in a sponsored scholarship program is evaluated to assess perceived benefit of program activities that go beyond awarding scholarships. The program is structured to help students develop professional skills such as communication, teamwork, job readiness, and goal setting in a context that allows for formal and informal mentoring. Annual themes often related to current issues affecting society provide a setting to motivate these skills. Results show that students value skills and experiences outside of their major requirements. This work describes the program and its process for continuous improvement and provides insights into student willingness to participate in personal and professional activities on top of rigorous STEM major requirements.

Did you read any of the common reads for SIGCSE 2015? Now's your chance to talk about them! Three books: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (Bantam Spectra, 1950), Bellwether by Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra, 1997) and Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Broadway Books, 2012) were proposed at the end of the 2014 conference. If you're interested in science fiction, whether on a personal, academic, or pedagogical level, come join us in this BoF and discuss one or more of the three suggested books. We'll provide potential topics and discussion questions targeting how to incorporate these books into a CS course, but the discussion will be open. The BoF will close with a discussion of potential books for the 2016 conference.

Engineering and Computer Science (E&CS) Education is an emerging discipline with a brief history and the unfortunate particularity that many folks outside our discipline are confused as to our purpose. In this special session, we will use two case studies to frame the larger questions around E&CS Education goals and help draw the conversation from practice to philosophy while creating a safe space for open conversation.

Are you interested in incorporating some of your favorite science fiction in your classes? Did you know it can help improve student interest in the technical topic? Come join us as we talk about ways to connect SciFi to artificial intelligence, robotics, networking, intellectual property, and other topics. We'll start with overviews of how we've used SciFi and have plenty of time for discussion of new works and old that connect to the material we need to cover, while drawing students into the content and the field.

Retaining students in computer science majors has been a persistent topic among computer science educators for almost two decades. Researchers have examined the relationship between belonging and engagement, self-efficacy, retention and persistence. Our quantitative research suggests that a student's sense of belonging is related to a student's perception of his ability, possibly more so than to actual performance. Our qualitative analysis further suggests that feelings of belonging can influence students' attitudes toward the mutability of ability, based on conversation and support from their academic and non-academic communities. Supporting a student's sense of belonging both to the discipline and their supportive communities can improve the academic resilience of computer science students, thus improving retention.

Despite strong evidence of the positive impact of active learning strategies, STEM faculty demonstrate a spectrum of receptiveness to incorporating active learning into their classrooms, and for a variety of reasons, engineering classes continue to be dominated by a passive lecture style. This paper draws on data from a four-year study that investigated the use of five social instruction strategies, including active learning. Twenty-four STEM faculty at 4 institutions were interviewed regarding their understanding of and attitudes toward these strategies. This paper focuses on the results of the active learning component of these interviews. Faculty most often interpreted active learning as what students do and viewed self-motivation as a key component of what students think while active learning. These results, while drawn from a small sample population, can nevertheless make an important contribution to understanding why passive learning remains predominant in the STEM classroom. This paper examines how the findings from this study can inform efforts to promote changes in STEM education that would bring more active learning to the classroom.

Responses from open-ended survey questions regarding undergraduate students' connections to community were collected from five different institutions, ranging from a large research institution in the Pacific Northwest to a small teaching college in the Northeast. Our results show that, regardless of institution or U.S. geographical location, STEM students felt connected to family more than any other community in their undergraduate experience. At institutions where faith plays a role in the institutional mission and culture, connections to religious organizations (especially church) were a close second in the strong connections to community that students reported in their lives. Across institutions, friends played a strong role in the communities in which students participated, and traditional extracurricular activities (non-academic clubs within the institution itself) also provided a significant source of connection for many students.

The use of science fiction (SF) to engage students in computer science learning is becoming more popular [1-6]. There is ample material available to help both undergraduate and graduate students make connections between technical content and human experience, from Star Trek to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to 2001: A Space Odyssey to I, Robot and many others. Fiction can be included in technical courses or used to draw students into the field in introductory classes. The panelists, who represent a range of schools, perspectives and classes, will present brief overviews (5-8 minutes) of how they have used science fiction to engage students in technical topics as well as ethical and societal issues related to computing. After the overviews, there will be plenty of time for discussion of examples used within the community and ways to make connections between science fiction and particular classes or topics. We will be gathering additional examples from the discussion and making them available online.

Retaining students in computer science (CS) majors has been a persistent topic among CS educators for almost two decades. Discussion and research has largely focused on improving student engagement in the academic experience in order to provide a more welcoming and compelling introduction to the field. Research has identified a wide variety of factors affecting student engagement in general, which in turn affects key outcomes including academic achievement, retention and persistence. Feeling connected to a community and sense of belonging can substantially influence student engagement. Our study suggests that this sense of belonging can also help mitigate student perceptions that influence them to be discouraged, especially about their ability to succeed, and leave computer science. In particular, support from extra-curricular as well as academic communities may lead students to perceive that ability is not a binary, fixed constraint, but a malleable gradient that can be influenced by factors within the student's control.

The success of any instructional style in promoting meaningful learning, whether novel or traditional, active or passive, is critically dependent on the engagement of students in the course of instruction. Improving engagement, whether explicitly or implicitly, is a central goal of effective pedagogy. Social learning strategies, such as active or collaborative learning, are one way of improving engagement. A specific type of these is classroom assessment techniques (CATs) as described by Angelo & Cross. This project examines both the impact of including CATs in courses on student engagement as measured through a brief questionnaire and the experience of faculty implementing the methods in their courses. Faculty are supported in their implementation through condensed literature and one-on-one mentoring. Results show that measures of student affect related to the course increase post-intervention and that faculty will continue to implement CATs in their courses.

We describe a new system for labeling speech corpora with high-level group interaction tags, called “meeting acts.” The system was motivated by a need to assess work seeking to automatically detect meeting style using dialog act information. We present information about the relationships seen between dialog act sequences and meeting style to motivate the labeling process. We provide a summary of the annotation system and labeling procedure, as well as preliminary inter-annotator reliability statistics on the ICSI Meeting Recorder Corpus.

We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as STATEMENT, Question, BACKCHANNEL, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling accuracy (65% based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody, and 71% based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of 35% and human accuracy of 84%) and a small reduction in word recognition error.

Linear channel compensation in speech recognition typically involves estimating an additive shift in the cepstral domain. This paper explores both Bayesian and maximum likelihood techniques to transform either the features or the model parameters. Experiments on the Macrophone corpus show error rate reductions of up to 16% over cepstral mean subtraction for short utterances.

We study the problem of detecting linguistic events at interword boundaries, such as sentence boundaries and disfluency locations, in speech transcribed by an automatic recognizer. Recovering such events is crucial to facilitate speech understanding and other natural language processing tasks. Our approach is based on a combination of prosodic cues modeled by decision trees, and word-based event N-gram language models. Several model combination approaches are investigated. The techniques are evaluated on conversational speech from the Switchboard corpus. Model combination is shown to give a significant win over individual knowledge sources. 1. INTRODUCTION Current automatic speech recognition systems output a string of words. Most natural language understanding systems, however, require structural information such as punctuation, which is present in text but not overtly indicated in spoken language. Similarly, for speech understanding and information extraction, it is important to fi...

Speech disfluencies (filled pauses, repetitions, repairs, and false starts) are pervasive in spontaneous speech. The ability to detect and correct disfluencies automatically is important for effective natural language understanding, as well as to improve speech models in general. Previous approaches to disfluency detection have relied heavily on lexical information, which makes them less applicable when word recognition is unreliable. We have developed a disfluency detection method using decision tree classifiers that use only local and automatically extracted prosodic features. Because the model doesn’t rely on lexical information, it is widely applicable even when word recognition is unreliable. The model performed significantly better than chance at detecting four disfluency types. It also outperformed a language model in the detection of false starts, given the correct transcription. Combining the prosody model with a specialized language model improved accuracy over either model alone for the detection of false starts. Results suggest that a prosody-only model can aid the automatic detection of disfluencies in spontaneous speech. 1.