SIGCSE 2020 Online - Birds of a Feather

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Contents

BOF #1A: Pedagogy and Classroom: How Can I Do This in That Space or Does it Even Matter?

Authors: Jesse Eickholt; Patrick Seeling

Abstract:

The classrooms used by Computer Science students come in all shapes and sizes, from large lecture halls to small computer labs to collaborative active learning classrooms. Does our teaching style need to match the space? Are particular classroom environments more effective than others and might the types of artifacts generated by Computer Science students lend themselves better to one space over the other? As many students come to class with their own personal computer, development environment and opinions about effective instruction, does the classroom and supporting technology even matter? What effect does the space have on the instructional choices made? This BOF will provide a platform for a discussion around individual teaching styles and preferences and how they relate to the classroom space. Access and awareness of active learning pedagogy and active learning classrooms can create both tension (e.g., not wanting to teach in an active learning classroom) and challenges (e.g., desire to have access to an active learning classroom despite the costs associated, how working specific techniques into a given space). Shared experiences will help participants better leverage their classroom spaces to their desired pedagogy.

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BOF #2A: Incorporating Parallel Computing in the Undergraduate Computer Science Curriculum

Authors: Suzanne Matthews; Joel Adams; Richard Brown; Elizabeth Shoop

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Teaching parallel and distributed computing (PDC) concepts is an ongoing and pressing concern for many undergraduate educators. The ACM/IEEE CS Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula (CS2013) recommends 15 hours of PDC education in the undergraduate curriculum. Most recently, the 2019 ABET Criteria for Accrediting Computer Science requires coverage of PDC topics. For faculty who are unfamiliar with PDC, the prospect of incorporating parallel computing into their courses can seem very daunting. For example, should PDC concepts be covered in a single required course (perhaps computer systems) or be scattered throughout different courses in the undergraduate curriculum? What languages are the best/easiest for students to learn PDC? How much revision is truly needed? This Birds of a Feather session provides a platform for computing educators to discuss the common challenges they face when attempting to incorporate PDC into their curricula and share potential solutions. Chiefly, the organizers are interested in identifying "gap areas" that hinder a faculty member's ability to integrate PDC into their undergraduate courses. The multiple viewpoints and expertise provided by the BOF leaders should lead to lively discourse and enable experienced faculty to share their strategies with those beginning to add PDC across their curricula. We anticipate that this session will be of interest to all CS faculty looking to integrate PDC into their courses and curricula.

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BOF #3A: Access to Computing Education for Students with Disabilities

Authors: Richard Ladner; Andreas Stefik; Amy J. Ko; Brianna Blaser

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Approximately 10% of computer science and engineering majors have a disability. Students with disabilities face a variety of challenges including those related to stigma around disability, inaccessible tools and instruction, disability disclosure, and a lack of mentors. This BOF will bring together individuals who are interested in increasing the representation of students with disabilities in computing and improving their success. Participants will share strategies to help each other do a better job of including these students in our classes and research projects. Resources related to accessible tools and instruction, universal design of learning, opportunities for students, and more will be shared.

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BOF #4A: POGIL in Computer Science for Beginners and Experts

Authors: Helen Hu; Chris Mayfield

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Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) is a research-based instructional strategy with a proven history across STEM disciplines. In a POGIL classroom, teams of students work on activities that are specifically designed to guide them to construct their own understanding of key concepts. At the same time, students develop process skills such as communication, teamwork, problem solving, and critical thinking. POGIL incorporates practices shown to be particularly helpful for students from underrepresented populations. In a POGIL classroom, teachers are facilitators, not lecturers. Multiple studies have shown that students in POGIL classes do better on common exams and in subsequent courses. For more information, see http://cspogil.org and http://pogil.org. This BOF will (1) enable people unfamiliar with POGIL to ask questions and learn more, and (2) bring together experienced POGIL practitioners to share experiences, concerns, ideas, and insights. As in a POGIL classroom, we will discuss topics in small teams and report out to the larger group.

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BOF #5A: Toward an Open-source Toolkit for Machine Learning Education

Authors: N. Rich Nguyen

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Machine Learning (ML) has become one of the highly participated courses at the undergraduate level in Computer Science. Open-source ML libraries make it easy for students to implement papers, share ideas, and conduct experiments on large scale datasets. With the emergence of public dataset portals (such as Kaggle, Amazon Datasets, and Google Datasets Search), the open-source community has produced many useful, high-quality libraries (such as Scikit-Learn, PyTorch, Keras, and Tensorflow among others). These open-source tools aim to make state-of-the-art ML algorithms and large-scale datasets accessible to all. While these ML libraries and datasets can benefit many undergraduate students in their pursuit of data-related careers, the task of choosing them for instructional purposes can be daunting for two reasons. First, all of these tools have advantages, drawbacks, and many overlapping issues. There is no single tool or dataset that covers all of the ML instructional needs. Second, due to the rapid advancements in the field, instructors often find a lack of comprehensive guidelines or standards on evaluating the instructional usability and real-world performance of open-source tools. How can these libraries and tools be integrated to aid the instructional activities of both classical machine learning as well as deep learning? This BOF will provide a platform for the discussion of the development of an open-source toolkit to support the teaching and learning of ML at the undergraduate level.

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BOF #6A: How Can We Make Office Hours Better?

Authors: Kevin Lin; Brian Railing

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Most personal student interactions with instructional staff come through office hours. Particularly in large courses, office hours are predominantly run by teaching assistants (TAs). TAs are best advantaged by support and training from more senior instructional staff, especially faculty. This Birds-of-a-Feather session will provide a forum for discussing challenges and innovations in managing office hours, particularly in computer science courses, with the aim of improving the student learning experience and environment. This session will have the opportunity for discussing the mentoring and personalized support of TAs, as well as what technological support exists, such as queue software or internal wikis, and additionally ideas for more significant changes to office hours structure that could lead to future collaborations or research. While this session will emphasize TA-supported office hours, the discussion should inspire new ideas and techniques for managing individual-instructor office hours as well.

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BOF #7A: Using Validated Assessments to Learn About Your Students

Authors: Michael Clancy; Cynthia Lee; Soohyun Liao; Leo Porter; Cynthia Taylor; Kevin Webb

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Computer Science now has a number of validated instruments available for measuring student knowledge or interest in computing (SCS1, BDSI, CAS, Digital Logic CI, etc.). But when and how should instructors and researchers use these instruments? In this BOF, we will begin by discussing the available instruments, their purpose, and how to obtain them. Then we will open the discussion to the group on what they would like to measure, how these instruments might work for them, and how to best employ them with their students.

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BOF #8A: "I've taken a first CS class and liked it! What's next?" Exploring the Multiplicity of CS2 Paths for Majors and Non-Majors

Authors: Thomas Bressoud; Margaret Ellis; Lea Wittie

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Driven by diverse needs of students, as well as increasing needs of other disciplines, the past two decades have seen a proliferation of emerging variations in how computer science programs approach a second course in the discipline. Approaches more focused on majors include adaptations to a traditional introduction to data structures course that may heavily incorporate object-oriented programming or emphasize using data structures from libraries. Paths that might be concurrent with a traditional CS2, or have greater appeal to non-majors include recent efforts with data science or secure computing. In a world of increasingly limited resources but ever-increasing needs and demands from inside and outside the major, how do we provide solutions?

Bringing together educators who are concerned about intermediate CS education will allow participants to hear multiple viewpoints about what the needs are and how various institutions are currently, or are considering, addressing them. The discussion leaders will kick off the conversation with local expertise---one approach of a CS2 course for majors and non-majors that emphasizes data science and modern practical skills such as databases and HTTP, another with new curricula for multiple CS2 courses, and a third with novel approaches in a traditional data structures CS2 course. Attendees will be able to connect with other people interested in the future of course curricula following CS1 and share ideas, resources, successes, and failures. We will be soliciting participants' perspectives on preparing CS2 students for downstream paths, including (i) future courses, (ii) interviews, (iii) internships, and (iv) research projects.

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BOF #9A: For Us, By Us: Resources for Computing Outreach Programs Designed by People of Color

Authors: Khalia Braswell; Jamika Burge; Sheena Erete; Christina Harrington

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Computer Science outreach programs for Black and Latinx communities are often led by those who are not of the community for which they are building. While there are programs that exist that are being ran by Black and Latinx men and women, they are often conducted in siloes and are not given the resources that other programs are given. This session will serve as a gathering for Black and Latinx BPC program leaders to share resources that could help with operations, funding, and collaboration amongst themselves and other external stakeholders.

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BOF #10A: Broadening Participation in Computing: The Critical Role of Community Colleges

Authors: Amardeep Kahlon; Beth Quinn; Lynne Grewe; Lisa Sandoval; Deborah Boisvert

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By 2026, the number of computing-related job openings in the US are expected to reach 3.5 million [1]. Yet even with an enrollment booming in many 4-year college computing programs, institutions of higher education have been unable to produce enough graduates to meet this growing demand. In addition, women and racial/ethnic minority students continue to be underrepresented in computing majors further reducing the potential computing workforce. Community colleges, because of their mission to serve their local communities, tend to have more diverse student populations. Yet, to date, they have not been considered a critical partner in the conversation on broadening participation in computing (BPC). To fill this gap, universities and community colleges need to work more collaboratively to bridge the workforce and diversity gaps [2]. In this BOF, participants will discuss strategies and resources for community colleges to participate more fully in the BPC community. Topics may include pathways from community colleges to 4-year computing programs, improving institutional culture to support advancement, providing role models so that students are encouraged to see themselves in computing, and strategies to recruit, retain, and motivate diverse students.

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BOF #11A: You Are Not Alone: Building Community Among Graduate Students in CS Education Research

Authors: Jean Salac; Joslenne Pena; Nicholas Lytle

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CSEd graduate students face a variety of unique issues. First, within a CS or information science program, this research area is not considered to be highly popular with respect to the quantity of CSEd faculty, graduate courses, and professionals immersed in this research area. Already, this presents a disadvantage compared to other peers in popular areas who have resources and/or a research community at their institutions to support them. Further, graduate students in this field are frequently one of the few, if not the only, CSEd researchers at their institutions. As a result, many graduate students have limited avenues to get consistent, relevant, critical feedback on their work, especially research-in-progress, i.e. research that has not already been published. In this Birds of a Feather (BoF) session, we aim to create and foster a safe and open environment that allows participants to get feedback on research-in-progress and share experiences and issues with being a graduate student in CSEd research. We invite genuine and honest conversations about the challenges facing rising academics and professionals in this area. Though the focus will be on CSEd research graduate students, any attendee who would like to hear about our experiences is welcome. We have two goals: (1) to cultivate mentorship relationships among participants to send them off with potential collaborators, supporters and advocates, and (2) to brainstorm ways to sustain these discussions in the ACM CSEd community.

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BOF #12A: Fix the Course, Not the Student: Positive Approaches to Cultivating Academic Integrity

Authors: Nathan Brunelle; John Hott

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The best-studied techniques for reducing academic dishonesty rates rely on increasing the likelihood of consequences. These techniques offer instructors effective tools for identifying dishonest behavior as a means to "encourage" honesty. We wonder if we can promote integrity through proactive measures, such as designing courses' structures and assignments to reduce temptations for cheating, or by sculpting culture and forming relationships to foster a robust "community of trust." Our discussion will consider students' perspectives on academic integrity, how those might differ from instructors' perspectives, and how to build firm yet compassionate systems for promoting honesty in coursework.

Through conversations with students and faculty, the discussion leaders have identified several compelling explanations for student cheating that largely derive from student culture and faculty messaging. We hope to share these lessons and inspire tactics for instructors to address student temptations to cheat that do not rely on the threat of penalty. This can help foster mentoring, rather than antagonistic, relationships between students and instructors, making computing courses increasingly welcoming for a greater diversity of students.

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BOF #13A: Effective Practices for Online Teaching

Authors: Maria Jump; Martin Schedlbauer; Anastasia Kurdia; Robert Montante

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Have you been asked to teach online and don't know how to get started? Have you delivered your course online to mixed reviews? Have you been teaching online for years? As more and more courses are begin offered online in an effort to deliver a quality education to a larger, more diverse group of students, one things is clear -- many of the pedagogical practices that we have come to rely on in our on ground courses do not translate to an online course. How do the on best practices in online education adapt to CS? This BOF will provide a platform for discussion of what it means to teach an instructor-led, asynchronous online course in CS. We will discuss methodologies used by online faculty that were particularly successful in helping students learn. Topics may include designing courses for distance learning, using media and technology tools effectively, engaging the online learner, building community among students, motivating student persistence and success, and/or building an online presence.

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BOF #14A: A Town Meeting: SIGCSE Committee on Expanding the Women-in-Computing Community

Authors: Paula Gabbert; Wendy Powley; Gloria Childress Townsend

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In January 2004, we organized the second SIGCSE Committee ("Expanding the Women-in-Computing Community"). The SIGCSE Board approved the charter, because the underrepresentation of women in computing is an international problem and an embarrassment for our profession. A BOF provides SIGCSE program advertising that will create a large audience for dissemination of information concerning successful gender issues projects and can provide time for discussion and brainstorming. Generally, the organizers divide the audience into a discussion subgroup and a dissemination section. We select discussion topics from our large listserv membership and offer short project presentations from representatives of ACM-W, NCWIT, ABI, CDC, CRA-W, etc. Last year, our listserv membership selected "assessment of Women-in-Computing projects" as the discussion topic. The forum provides an important annual meeting for a large group of people, who work to increase the representation of women in computing in their separate organizations and who do not customarily have an opportunity to share ideas face-to-face.

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BOF #15A: Ethics and Social Responsibility in Computer Science Curricula

Authors: Kathy Pham

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This BOF will provide a platform for the discussion of ethics in Computer Science curricula. This will be a place to discuss challenges and successes over the years, as well as recent efforts to integrate ethics into the curricula. We will discuss some strategies developed in cohorts like the Responsible Computer Science Challenge, where universities and colleges were supported in the conceptualization, development, and piloting of curricula that integrate ethics with undergraduate computer science training, educating a new wave of engineers who bring holistic thinking to the design of technology products.

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BOF #1B: The Landscape of Broadening Participation in Computing, Using State and National Datasets to Advocate for Equity in Computer Science Education

Authors: Anne Leftwich; Megean Garvin; Sarah Dunton; Jayce R. Warner; Chris Stephenson

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As many U.S. states continue to work to increase and broaden participation in K-20 computing education, it is imperative to collect data and construct landscape reports to create organized efforts and strategic plans. Effective CS education interventions, and strategic plans, must be data-driven in order to ensure that all students have access to and are retained in high quality K- 20 computer science pathways (Stanton et al., 2017). The Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance, and the 23 member states, have been leaders in the development and promotion of state-level landscape reports. Several ECEP states have successfully designed, delivered, and analyzed data collection tools to landscape the current status of computer science education within their own state (e.g., Maryland, Indiana, Texas). However, there have been instances where data collected by different stakeholders have provided conflicting perspectives and viewpoints. Conflicting data, data that fails to account for intersectionality, or leaves out critical populations or context, potentially distracts time and effort from broadening participation in computing. This session will provide a platform for researchers and evaluators to discuss data relevant to BPC efforts, how to develop surveys, and how to structure and disseminate reports.

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BOF #2B: Teaching on the Front End: Gathering all Educators Interested in Web and Mobile Design and Development

Authors: Erika Lee; Joel Ross; Jen Kramer

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Front-end development skills are a practical necessity for creating impactful "real-world" systems. Yet universities don't often prioritize skills-focused courses such as web or mobile development that teach students to design and implement user-facing systems. We believe our curricula should include these skills and stacks, and that they are a key practice through which foundational CS concepts are applied. While other technology areas have research- or education-focused conferences, front-end programming and design skill-sets are mostly relegated to professional conferences where little time is focused on education. Currently there is no way for people teaching web and mobile development in higher education to easily connect. This BoF will gather as-of-yet unconnected instructors in these areas. We will discuss questions of practice, and share expertise and support around how to best teach these user-focused skills. How can you and your students keep up with rapid changes to programming languages such as JavaScript or Swift? Should teaching focus on a particular framework such as React or Vue (or something else)-and if so which one? What is the role of "no code" tools (e.g., Webflow, Bubble.io) in teaching front-end development? Should you teach front-end courses like a traditional CS course or like a code bootcamp? How can you integrate foundational skills in your web and mobile development courses? Does your department want to teach these practical skills, but lacks the resources, faculty or knowledge to do so? Let's share and discuss.

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BOF #3B: Jupyter for Teaching Data Science

Authors: Eric Van Dusen

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There has been a recent evolution of cloud-based tools that allow for easy and powerful ways for students to access the industry standard data science toolkit from within a browser window. Jupyter notebooks were originally developed for sharing of scientific results and reproducible open science. However, when delivered through a cloud-based server, they have huge benefits for teaching, including removing the need to install any software locally or require any specific machine to be used by students. The use of teaching Jupyterhubs to date, both for introductory to Data Science courses, as well as more advanced topics is growing rapidly. We would like to have a conversation about how to use Jupyterhubs and teaching Jupyter notebooks from a variety of instructors and institutions. We are also interested in how to provide these types of resources to additional educational settings who may be more resource constrained.

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BOF #4B: From Human-Computer Interaction to User Experience: Evolving Curriculum to Meet Student Needs

Authors: Rachelle Hippler; Samuel Jaffee; Laura Marie Leventhal

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Computer Science Curriculum 2013 and Software Engineering Curriculum 2014 recommend eight and ten hours of human-computer interaction (HCI) concepts, respectively. SE2014 notes that human factors and usability are areas where motivation is needed within SE pedagogy, "Students will often not appreciate the need for attention to those areas unless they actually experience usability differences or watch users having difficulty using software." However, while HCI topics include user-centered design, basic human principles, evaluation and understanding of links to technological and societal issues, many contemporary industry settings require broader skills in support of the user experience (UX), defined by Neilsen and Norman as "all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company." As industry demands for people with skills in UX grow, it is useful for educators to share their best ideas and practices in the teaching of these concepts. For educators currently teaching HCI and for those planning to teach HCI and UX, we hope to discuss strategies for including broader UX topics in their classes. Additionally, we hope to include faculty who might be integrating UX topics into curricula from psychology, human factors, Advanced Placement CS Principles courses and others. We anticipate discussion of the following: UX research methods, approaches to UX design and validation, UX requirements analysis, specification and UX business case development. We will discuss these concepts in the context of computer science and software engineering education and application as well as other settings of interest to participants.

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BOF #5B: Cybersecurity Across All Disciplines in 2020

Authors: Richard Weiss; Jens Mache; Ankur Chattopadhyay; Stacey Watson; Elizabeth Hawthorne; Xenia Mountrouidou

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We need to greatly expand the number of students studying cybersecurity in order to meet the increasing demand for security professionals. As a community, we can use our expertise and alliances with other fields to create interdisciplinary courses and modules to attract diverse students into cybersecurity. For example, Liberal Arts Colleges have a strong core general education curriculum that can be enhanced with cybersecurity concepts. On one hand, students from non-CS majors are important for the cybersecurity workforce as they will be shaping the policies and business processes that affect cybersecurity decisions. On the other hand, well rounded CS students that take interdisciplinary security courses and CS1 will be able to apply the concepts and solve today's complex security problems. This BoF will explore ideas for integrating the technical content of cybersecurity with political science, business, law, psychology, philosophy, international affairs, and others. Participants from colleges, universities and K-12 will be able to co-create plans for these interdisciplinary experiences. We will discuss possible ways to integrate security-related topics hands-on exercises into existing courses from other fields or the general education core curriculum. The questions we will ask are, "Have you created interdisciplinary courses or modules? If so, what was your experience? Were there problems? If you had no resource or policy constraints, what would an interdisciplinary security curriculum look like at your school?" We will generate a list of ideas and disseminate that publicly.

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BOF #6B: Variable Interest Rate: What Experiences Explain Differences in Interest in Computer Science Among Students?

Authors: Joshua Rosenberg; Alex Lishinski

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The entire enterprise of computer science education is predicated on the ability to develop and sustain students' interest in the subject. Given how fundamental this aspect of the educational process is, our understanding of what experiences are actually driving the development of interest in computer science remains far from complete. This BOF session seeks to inform the direction of a new research project dedicated to investigating this question, by eliciting a discussion from expert practitioners about what they know from their experiences about how interest in CS develops.

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BOF #7B: Engaging JROTC Youth in CS Pathways: A Community Discussion of K-12 Cyber Security and Data Science Topics

Authors: Ruthe Farmer; Tina Boyle Whyte; Anthony Todd Taylor

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CSforALL is collaborating with the US Air Force JROTC HQ and additional partners to launch JROTC-CS, a demonstration project to design and test implementation models for the long-term scale up of CS and cybersecurity education programs within the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC). There are approximately 500K Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) cadets at 3,400 partner high schools across the US. The JROTC represents a significant pool of public service oriented talent. The JROTC program is comprised of a highly diverse population, with a majority-minority student population and 40% of the JROTC being female, and JROTC is strongly represented in schools serving economically disadvantaged populations (over 50% Title 1 schools). The JROTC infrastructure is under-leveraged as a technology talent development opportunity, and represents an accessible, high ROI/low cost opportunity to accelerate preparation of the future workforce in critical areas such as computing, cybersecurity, defense technologies, AI and more. The JROTC-CS Demonstration project aims to design and test experiences for the participating districts, schools, teachers, JROTC instructors, and cadets that lead to a comprehensive implementation model for future scale across the JROTC infrastructure. An estimated additional 60K students will benefit from this project, as capacity for CS and cyber security is increased at their schools.

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BOF #8B: What Mathematics Should be Required of Computer Science Majors?

Authors: James R. Matthews; John P. Dougherty; Peter-Michael Osera

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Mathematics requirements for computer science students vary broadly by institution. The general question of what mathematics should be required of computer science majors naturally leads to more specific questions such as: What mathematics content should be required? What mathematical concepts? Should the theory of computation be required? Should calculus, discrete mathematics, probability, and/or linear algebra? What impact do newer fields such as data science and machine learning have on the mathematics needed or required for computer science majors? What are faculty members doing to integrate mathematics into their computer science courses and does this help some students overcome difficulties learning the mathematics? What level of mathematical maturity should a computer science graduate attain? In this session, participants will share their answers to these questions with the goal of coming to a broader understanding of how mathematics informs the discipline. Through this discussion, we will try to reconcile our idealized curriculum with the practical reality of requirements, dependencies, and limits imposed by our institutions.

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BOF #9B: Supporting CS Students Living with Mental Illnesses: Sharing Experiences, Establishing Support, and Discussing Best Practices

Authors: Nicholas Lytle; Christian Murphy; Brianna Blaser

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Recent studies have demonstrated the prevalence of mental health issues and illnesses among students in higher education, especially in STEM degree programs like computing. While we work as a community towards solutions that benefit the mental health of all students, we must also take targeted action towards supporting students with diagnosed mental illnesses (e.g. major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia). This should begin by allowing these often unheard students an opportunity to voice their invisible experiences in a safe space. This will start creating a shared understanding among faculty and students of how these illnesses can affect the educational experience, as well as how our common university practices can affect the lives of those living with these illnesses. This space will give students an understanding that their voices and experiences are valued and heard by the general academic community. We hope this will also show students that they are not alone and grant an opportunity for them to connect with others and establish networks of support. We will end this session discussing and disseminating best practices for supporting this community.

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BOF #10B: Assessment of CS Students’ Ethical Reasoning Skills .

Authors: Emanuelle Burton; David Dueber; Judy Goldsmith; Beth Goldstein; Shannon Sampson; Michael D. Toland

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The national push for CS departments to teach students to think about ethical implications of their work raises critical questions about how we approach this pedagogically. In contrast to the typical assessments of CS ethical thinking, which have focused on a student's ability to operate successfully within one kind of normative paradigm, our research group advocates for teaching ethics as an ongoing practice that incorporates multiple normative frameworks and an emphasis on the descriptive element of ethical reflection. In this special session, we will discuss the differences between normative and descriptive ethics, practice describing ethical dilemmas, and work together on developing assessment capabilities for descriptive ethical thinking for CS.

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BOF #11B: Graduate Programs in CS Education: Why 2020 is the Right Time

Authors: Susanne Hambrusch; Alan Peterfreund; Aman Yadav; Amy J. Ko

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Opportunities for training CS K-12 pre-service and in-service teachers, research in CS Education, and career pathways for PhDs/EdDs in CS education are happening, but often in an uncoordinated way. We advocate that now is the right time for CS and Education to collaborate on developing new joint degree programs in Computer Science Education and to explore joint faculty appointments. High undergraduate enrollment in computing programs and the increasing interest in CS courses from non-majors represent a unique opportunity for starting successful programs. As more of CS undergraduates are undergraduate TAs and see teaching and learning from a non-learner perspective, their interest in education has also increased. The growing interest in CS education, including the need for effecting CS teaching at both K-12 and the undergraduate level, provide interesting job opportunities for CS education researchers. As CS departments develop new undergraduate degree programs and scale class sizes, research on questions like How do we teach effectively computing to different audiences? How can we assess CS learning? What are culturally responsive pedagogies? is important. To answer many of these and related questions, CS departments should be actively engaged in CS Education research, from training graduate students in interdisciplinary programs to research programs. This BOF will provide a platform for the discussion on what such graduate programs - from certificate to a PhD - can and should look like, what challenges exist to creating them, and how students with different backgrounds should get trained in the relevant foundations of CS and Education.

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BOF #12B: Research Questions regarding Undergraduate TA and Mentor Programs in Computer Science

Authors: Diba Mirza; Phillip Conrad; Cynthia Lee

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Undergraduates have been an important part of the teaching staff at many universities for decades. Recent work such as the Peer Teaching Summit at SIGCSE 2019 [1] and a systematic literature review [2] have focused more attention on issues related to the use of undergraduates in teaching assistant roles. This BOF provides a forum to discuss open research questions about undergrad TA/mentor programs at various stages in their evolution. Attendees will have an opportunity to discuss research questions, research methods, and explore possible collaborations. Discussion Leader(s): Diba Mirza will open the session by summarizing the key findings of literature review on UTAs from ICER'19 [1]-in particular, the fact that while there is widespread consensus that using UTAs is a good idea, the evidence backing up this consensus is mostly anecdotal. This creates many opportunities to establish the effectiveness of current practices, and the claimed benefits of the use of UTAs through more rigorous research and to discuss innovative ways to incorporate UTAs in teaching outside of what has been reported in the literature. This will be followed by a themed discussion to brainstorm about research within each of these areas. Based on the large turnout at the BOF on Undergraduate Teaching Assistants in SIGCSE'19, we plan to organize the discussion in smaller groups. Diba Mirza, Phillip Conrad, and Cynthia Lee will lead the discussion within each group. The leads will also document the discussions and share it with the participants.

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BOF #13B: Birds of a Feather Who'd Like to Share Software Together: Teaching Tools that Improve Efficiency and Outcomes

Authors: Douglas Lloyd; Brian Yu; David J. Malan

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Odds are we've all used (or tried!) quite a few tools to facilitate efficiency inside and outside of the classroom and empower students to learn more effectively. Some of these tools are perhaps homegrown and unique to one's own institution, but freely available educational technologies abound as well, some in the cloud, some for Macs and PCs, some open-source. And quite a few commercial tools offer free or discounted educational plans as well. In this BoF, we'll begin with a whirlwind tour of the tools we ourselves use, identifying the problems they solve and how well, then quickly open the floor to everyone to share their favorites as well. Along the way, we'll note every tool mentioned and share the results. Attendees should exit this session with a better understanding of the educational-technology landscape, familiarized with innovations they can bring back to their own classes.

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BOF #14B: Teaching Track Faculty in Computer Science

Authors: Chris Gregg; Shawn Lupoli; Laney Strange

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Many computer science departments have chosen to hire faculty to teach in teaching-track positions that parallel the standard tenure-track position, providing the possibility of promotion, longer-term contracts, and higher pay for excellence in teaching and service. This birds-of-a-feather is designed to gather educators, both experienced and new to teaching track positions, who are currently in such a position to share their experiences as members of the faculty of their departments and schools, and to provide opportunities for schools considering such positions to gather information. This year, we plan on discussing teaching load, particularly as it relates to expanding class sizes and limited budgets for teaching staff support (e.g., TAs, graders, etc.). We will also discuss office hours strategies for both faculty and TAs in light of the same large class-size concerns.

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BOF #15B: Teaching Interdisciplinary Courses with Data

Authors: Yekaterina Kharitonova; Marc Rigas

Abstract:

Teaching interdisciplinary courses is an exciting way to build collaborations between different departments and to make students aware of the potential impact of their work. Students in these courses can develop skills in synthesis and complex problem solving by learning to draw parallels between different fields of study and application areas. The goal of this BoF is to bring together a community of educators who are teaching interdisciplinary and/or data science courses with the goal of expanding a support network of data science faculty and developing educational standards for undergraduate data science curricula. We would like to leverage the SIGCSE community to bring together people from different disciplines, institutions, and organizations. The session will include a chance for participants to discuss their experience with and challenges with interdisciplinary course teaching. The second half of the hour will be spent trying to identify common themes to be addressed in follow up discussions and meetings. These materials will be posted on the Data Science Pedagogy repository: https://github.com/data-science-pedagogy

ACM DL Paper Link ACM DL Paper