This paper describes our team's experience in designing and delivering the online teacher professional development (PD) program, Computer Science for San Antonio (CS4SA), aimed at empowering educators with computer science (CS) knowledge to increase Latinx participation in CS and STEM education within a large, urban predominantly Latinx school district in South Texas. This paper highlights the successes, challenges, and lessons learned while facilitating two cohorts of the CS PD through online platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of this program, participants recognized the importance of integrating CS into their classroom and becoming advocates for the discipline at the high school level. Additionally, teachers, investigators, and other personnel learned important lessons for enhancing the program's impact through collaboration with district administrators and refinement of the online learning experience.

CS4SA is an in-service teacher professional development (PD) program designed by our team for secondary teachers from a predominately Latinx school district to create more computer science (CS) opportunities for their diverse classrooms. This poster presents our findings on participants' self-reflections as emerging advocates for CS following the online PD program.

Recent global demand for cybersecurity professionals is promising, with the U.S. job growth rate at 28%, three times the national average. Lacking qualified applicants, many organizations struggle to fill open positions. In a global survey, 2,300 security managers reported that 59% of their security positions were unfilled, although 82% anticipated cyberattacks to their systems. At the same time, the cybersecurity field is broadening, not only in technical concepts but also in human factors, business processes, and international law. The field has not become culturally diversified, however. Professionals hired in 2018 included only 24.9% women, 12.3% African Americans, and 6.8% Latinos. These facts create an opportunity for higher education: diversify the profession while increasing the numbers of skilled computer scientists. New and integrated methods of attracting student populations in the field of cybersecurity are needed. The working group goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of approaches used in higher education to diversify the cybersecurity field through literature review, analysis of the findings, and a survey on techniques used for diversification of the cybersecurity field.

Abstract This paper investigates how high school students in an introductory computer science (CS) course approach computing in the logic programming (LP) paradigm. This qualitative study shows how novice students operate within the LP paradigm while engaging in foundational computing concepts and skills: students are engaged in a cyclical process of abstraction, reasoning, and creating representations of their ideas in code while also being informed by the (procedural) requirements and the revision/debugging process. As these computing concepts and skills are also expected in traditional approaches to introductory K-12 CS courses, this paper asserts that LP is a viable paradigm choice for high school novices.

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a novel project designed to facilitate the learning of memory management concepts and interactions between different components. This project removes the complexity of a full or specific operating system by implementing memory management inside the user space. Evaluation results show that the mean exam scores improved by about 29% to 34%. On average, the total code size is less than 300 lines and time spent working on this project is under 17 hours. Therefore, this project is beneficial in helping students learn memory management while maintaining a reasonable project workload.

This paper discusses the design of an introductory computer science course for high school students using declarative programming. Though not often taught at the K-12 level, declarative programming is a viable paradigm for teaching computer science due to its importance in artificial intelligence and in helping student explore and understand problem spaces. This paper describes the authors' implementation of a declarative programming course for high school students during a 4-week summer session.

This paper discusses two case studies of students observed in an introductory computer science (CS1) course. Observations reinforce notions of the potential benefits of culturally and personally relevant instruction in the computer science (CS) classroom and call into question the stigmatization of 'nerd' culture within the literature of CS education. As this study is qualitative and exploratory in nature, it does not provide definitive, statistically generalizable findings -- however, it does unearth nuanced and potentially beneficial pathways of investigation for CS educators and researchers that many quantitative methods might miss. Specifically, observations highlight potential benefits of supporting students' perceptions of more diverse CS identities including broader understandings of the "CS nerd" identity.

Critical thinking, problem solving, the use of tools, and the ability to consume and analyze information are important skills for the 21st century workforce. This article presents a qualitative case study that follows five undergraduate biology majors in a computer science course (CS0). This CS0 course teaches programming within a data-driven context and is part of a university-wide initiative to improve students' quantitative scholarship. In this course, students learn computing concepts and computational thinking by writing programs in MATLAB that compute with data, by performing meaningful analyses, and by writing about the results. The goal of the study reported here is to better understand the thought processes students use in such a data-driven approach. Findings show that students engage in an ongoing organizational process to understand the structure of the data. The computational and visualization tasks appear to be closely linked, and the visualization component appears to provide valuable feedback for students in accomplishing the programming tasks.

Users have vast amounts of information at their disposal and access to many tools that can compute on that data. Often, no particular program can fulfill a user's needs; or, when such a program exists, it may be too obscure for the user to find. When users encounter this problem, they resort to ad-hoc approaches, such as importing and exporting data to different file formats, as a way to piece together disparate features from several different programs. As a result, users end up manually entering and manipulating data, defeating the purpose of automatic computing machines.

This paper discusses a cognitive study of how interactive multimedia authoring (IMA) affects novice computer science students' conceptual understanding of object-oriented programming (OOP). In this study, interactive multimedia authoring refers to the construction of a role-playing game using a game template developed with Adobe Flash CS3 and ActionScript 2.0. Three cognitive processes of disequilibrium, exploration, and awareness were observed in this study, which aided the transformation of students' understanding of OOP through interactive multimedia authoring.