ABSTRACT. As we move forward with CS for All, it’s important to ensure that all students, including students with disabilities have access to K-12 computing education. AccessCSforAll, previously known as AccessCS10K, works to increase the accessibility of K-12 computing education to ensure that students with disabilities can participate in computing courses. Many of the programming tools, curricula, and books that are available for teaching K-12 computing courses are inaccessible to many students with disabilities. This workshop aims to bring together individuals who are developing programming tools, curricula, books, and other materials with accessibility experts for interactive discussion about improving the accessibility of these materials.

ABSTRACT. POSSE, the Professors Open Source Software Experience, prepares instructors to guide student participation in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects. This POSSE Roundup is a workshop for instructors who have previously attended POSSE. It will provide an opportunity to share experiences and discuss challenges related to student participation in HFOSS. Breakout sessions will provide time for participants to share and work on HFOSS learning activities. The workshop structure of the day will emphasize active participation of attendees.

ABSTRACT. This event, led by members of the ACM Joint Task Force (JTF) for Cybersecurity Education, will engage participants in a direct dialog concerning the development of undergraduate curricular guidance. Specifically, this session will focus on ensuring that the curricular guidance is being developed to support worldwide adoption and to foster instructional relationships industry stakeholders and training providers. The JTF is seeking valuable input from the SIGCSE community in shaping the next version of the guidelines. During the event, an overview of the curricular guidance straw version will be presented, and participants will actively engage in exploring how the guidelines can be improved/used for course and program creation, review, and articulation, as well as for other purposes not yet conceived. The purpose of this session is not to discuss the content of the curricular volume, that discussion will occur during the JTF special session scheduled for the main SIGCSE program. Rather, this session will provide an opportunity for participants to address the larger context and focus specifically on the broad stakeholder audience.

The Joint Task Force on Cybersecurity Education (JTF) was chartered by the ACM Education Board in September 2015 with the expressed purpose of developing comprehensive, undergraduate curricular guidance in cybersecurity education to support future program development and associated educational efforts. The JTF is a collaboration among major international computing societies: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS), Association for Information Systems Special Interest Group on Security (AIS SIGSEC), and the International Federation for Information Processing Technical Committee on Information Security Education (IFIP WG 11.8). The JTF grew out of the foundational efforts of the Cyber Education Project with its members continuing to collaborate with the JTF.

ABSTRACT. This event is for instructors (at any level) who use POGIL, guided inquiry, or related active learning approaches in their classrooms, or who have previously attended an introductory POGIL workshop. (There is a separate Introduction to POGIL workshop at SIGCSE 2017, and regional 3-day workshops every summer). The event will run from 8:30am to 5:30pm and consist of 4 sessions, with breaks and lunch. We will develop and post a detailed schedule based on the participants and their interests and priorities. Our goal is to help everyone share experiences and ideas, and to continue to grow the community of colleagues and collaborators. Thus, the event will include lightning talks, focus groups, workshop sessions, and time to review and discuss draft activities. For more information, see: http://cspogil.org/2017-03+SIGCSE+Pre-Conf+Event

ABSTRACT. The goal of this workshop is to provide critical mentoring information
and advice for early-career (i.e. assistant professor) women in
Computer Science and Engineering who are interested in advancing their
career. Speakers for the event are experienced,
senior faculty members with extensive practical knowledge and
mentoring involvement. Topics include promotion to the next level, being an effective
leader, managing down/up - students/chair/dean, mentoring, effective
teaching and class management, leading initiatives and building
programs, and academic negotiations, with plenty of time for questions
and discussion. The day-long workshop, to be held on Wednesday, March
8, will be co-located with the SIGCSE 2017 conference in Seattle.

ABSTRACT. The goal of this workshop is to provide critical mentoring information and advice for women graduate students (in their final year) in Computer Science and Engineering who are interested in an academic career in an education track. Speakers for the event are experienced, senior faculty members with extensive practical knowledge and mentoring involvement. Topics include mentoring, research strategies, finding the right job, networking strategies, using the classroom as your research study, promotion and tenure strategies, and life balance in an academic research environment, with plenty of time for questions and discussion. The day-long workshop, to be held on Wednesday, March 8, will be co-located with the SIGCSE 2017 conference in Seattle.

ABSTRACT. What are the challenges that Department Chairs face? How would you design the ideal Department Chair? What are the features of a great Department Chair? What are the issues in having a poor Department Chair? Department Chairs are rarely given the opportunity to learn how to do the job. If you are a new Chair, an experienced Chair, thinking about becoming a Chair, or if you have stories to tell about awesome or terrible Department Chairs, then you should participate in the SIGCSE 2017 Department Chairs Workshop. The discussions and insights from this Workshop should improve the quality of the Department Chair experience: whether you are a Chair or not, this session will be helpful in navigating your academic career.

More information on the Department Chairs Roundtable can be found at: http://sigcse2017.sigcse.org/attendees/presymposium.html#DepartmentChairsRoundtable

ABSTRACT. Driverless cars are a feat of engineering and computer science. While not yet a commercial reality, this topic is not only popular with students (and faculty) but also provides a rich environment to explore a plethora of key computer science topics. These topics range from the algorithmically technical (e.g. obstacle recognition, inter-vehicle communication), to those of algorithmic fairness (e.g. load balancing versus priority), to those of professional and computational ethics (e.g. an unavoidable Sophie's Choice).

This workshop aims to bring together experts in driverless cars, algorithms, ethics and algorithmic fairness with a community of interested CS educators to discuss and work through topics, recommended approaches and even educational modules/exercises in driverless cars for the undergraduate computing curricula.

This workshop is sponsored by ACM SIGCAS (Special Interest Group on Computers and Society) and is free and open to the SIGCSE community.

ABSTRACT. This event, led by the ACM CCECC (Committee for Computing Education in Community Colleges), will engage participants in exploring and using ACM’s curricular guidance for associate-degree transfer programs in Computer Science in programs at their own colleges. In 2015, under the auspices of the ACM Education Board the CCECC began updating the ACM Computing Curricula 2009: Guidelines for Associate-Degree Transfer Curriculum in Computer Science with inclusion of contemporary cybersecurity concepts. To this end, the CCECC established a task force of community college educators to review the ACM/IEEE Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013) and identify foundational material in CS2013 that is appropriate for the first two years of a computer science baccalaureate degree. To further inform the guidance, the CCECC administered surveys to a global audience of computer science educators to solicit input related to CS2013 knowledge areas (KAs) and knowledge units (KUs) and on cybersecurity topics which are appropriate for associate-degree computer science transfer programs. The guidance has been through two rounds of public review and comment, and will be in near-final form by SIGCSE 2017. During this affiliated event, participants will receive an overview of the ACM guidelines and will engage directly in exploring how the guidelines can be used at their own college for program creation, review, articulation, and other purposes, by aligning their computer science program to the ACM guidelines and by using an online correlation tool developed by the CCECC.

ABSTRACT. This NSF-funded SIGCSE 2017 pre-symposium event will provide an opportunity for emerging and aspiring CS education researchers to learn the elements of different types of successful computing education research and to obtain feedback on their proposed research designs. The SIGCSE event will invite education and computer science education researchers, individually and jointly, from various institutions to discuss either research that has been conducted or research that is being proposed. The event will assist proposers of computing education research in forming well identified education research questions and selecting appropriate research designs as described in [Guidelines 2013]. The event contents will be guided by the discussions at the ICER UP CS Ed Workshop we organized in September 2016 in Melbourne, Australia. That workshop discussed example CS education projects that would be used in this pre-symposium event to help guide emerging and aspiring researchers.

ABSTRACT. The first programming language for most children worldwide today is a blocks-based language, like Scratch or Snap. GP is a blocks-based programming language designed to be a follow-on. GP aims to be a general purpose language, like Python or Ruby, in which students can create more complex programs including building standalone applications. GP includes a mechanism for creating modules for others to re-use and a wide variety of primitives, including tools for manipulating CVS and JSON data, for addressing the serial port and network connections, and for manipulating pixels in pictures and samples in sounds. The language could be used in computer science classes beyond introductory computer science. GP is an exploration of the question “How far can we go with a blocks-based programming language? Do we have to move students to a textual programming language to explore advanced computational ideas and applications?” In this laptop-required workshop, participants will try out GP. They will explore sample projects and create their own projects that push on advanced features of GP such as using multiple classes and instances, creating sets of blocks that can be shared as extension modules, using cloud data, or manipulating images and sounds. GP will be released (free and open source) in Summer 2017, so our goal is to find early adopters who are interested in trying GP and developing examples for others.

ABSTRACT. One of the most important, and difficult, aspects of starting an education research project is identifying an interesting, answerable, repeatable, measurable, and appropriately scoped research question. The lack of a valid research question reduces the potential impact of the work and could result in wasted effort. The goal of this workshop is to help educational researchers get off on the right foot by defining such a research question. This workshop is part of the larger Designing Empirical Education Research Studies (DEERS) project, which consists of an ongoing series of workshops in which researcher cohorts work with experienced empirical researchers to design, implement, evaluate, and publish empirical work in computer science education. In addition to instruction on the various aspects of good research questions, DEERS alumni will join us to mentor attendees in development of their own research questions in small group breakout sessions. At the end of the workshop, attendees will leave with a valid research question that can then be the start for designing a research study. Attendees will also receive information on how to apply to attend the full summer workshop, where they can fully flesh out the empirical study design, and join a DEERS research cohort. More information about DEERS can be found at http://empiricalcsed.org.

ABSTRACT. This workshop introduces participants to CS50 IDE (cs50.io), a web-based integrated development environment based on Amazon's Cloud9 (c9.io). Not only does the IDE enable students to work on programming projects within a browser, without need for local downloads or installations, it also provides students with an integrated terminal window and full sudo privileges. Underneath the hood is a Docker “container” that allows students to experiment with the underlying Ubuntu Linux OS, installing and configuring software at will, adapting it to their particular projects’ needs. The IDE supports any compiler, interpreter, or other software that can be installed via a Linux command-line, while the IDE itself provides a fully-featured text editor for text files and source code that reside on the underlying instance. The Cloud9 GUI is fully extensible through a plugin system and is leveraged by CS50 IDE to provide additional functionality for students. Among the additional features implemented through this mechanism are a GUI-based file submission system, an optional “less comfortable” mode that simplifies the GUI to provide a scaffolded experience for students new to programming, and a GUI front end for the GNU Project Debugger, a CLI debugger for many languages, including C. This workshop will highlight useful features of the IDE in the context of classrooms (including the collaborative nature of a workspace to allow pair programming or provide alternative one-on-one instruction), provide tips for writing or adapting assignments based on its architecture, and introduce developing plugins for full customization.

ABSTRACT. This workshop introduces participants to the concepts and use of BRIDGES, a software infrastructure designed to facilitate hands-on experience for solving traditional problems in introductory computer science courses using data from real-world systems that are of interest to students, such as social networks(Twitter, Facebook), scientific or engineering datasets(USGIS Earthquake data), Google Maps, etc. BRIDGES provides easy access(typically function calls) to real-world data sets for use in routine data structures programming assignments, without requiring students to work with complex and varied APIs to acquire such data. BRIDGES also provides \textsl{visualization capabilities, allowing the studnets to visualize the data structure they have created as part of their assignment}. BRIDGES visualizations can be easily \textsl{shared, via a weblink,} with peers, friends, and family. Workshop attendees will engage in hands-on experience with BRIDGES and multiple datasets, and will have the opportunity to discuss how BRIDGES can be used to support various introductory computer science courses.

ABSTRACT. MIT App Inventor is widely used to introduce students to programming and building mobile apps. In this workshop, we will introduce AppVis, an extension to App Inventor that allows users to create apps that publish data to iSENSE (isenseproject.org), a web-based system for collaborating with data and visualizations. Using AppVis, apps can also retrieve data from iSENSE and display visualizations in the app. This workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to App Inventor, AppVis, and iSENSE. You will build our demo apps including jump counter, survey, and mapping apps. We'll have conversations about how to introduce AppVis to your non-majors courses, intro-CS courses, and interdisciplinary teaching. Prior experience with App Inventor is helpful, but not necessary.

ABSTRACT. The workshop introduces participants to Weka, an open source Data Mining software package written in Java and available from www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/. The goal of the workshop is to present the basic functionality of Weka that may be used in the undergraduate computer science and engineering curricula. The Weka system provides a rich set of powerful Machine Learning algorithms for Data Mining tasks, along with a comprehensive set of tools for data pre-processing, statistics and visualization, all available through an easy to use graphical user interface. Weka is widely used for educational purposes. Recently, with the increasing popularity of Big Data, it becomes a popular tool for Analytics and Data Science. Weka’s rich functionality also allows its use for Text and Web document pre-processing and mining. All this makes it a suitable platform for enhancing the CS curriculum with hands-on exercises and practical projects. The workshop will present examples of such projects and exercises in the area of Web document classification and clustering. The basic steps of document collection, creating the vector space model, data preprocessing, attribute selection, and applying classification and clustering algorithms will be discussed. These topics will be covered in a way that will allow participants with no particular background in machine learning or data mining to appreciate the use of Weka in computer science education.

ABSTRACT. Computer systems courses are often challenging to students who must learn the characteristics and behavior of a variety of system components and tools across multiple levels of abstraction. This workshop shows how microcontroller-based projects (“micro projects”) can make topics such as data/program representation, bit-manipulation, I/O operation, event-handling, and digital communication more visible, concrete, and motivating. Participants will learn to use an Arduino-based hardware platform (programming in C/C++ apart from the Arduino IDE) to develop two example micro projects that demonstrate bit manipulation using digital I/O, and event handling with interrupts. Beyond the primary concepts, we will discuss how these projects may be extended or modified to introduce other topics, such as microcontroller ISA, assembly language programming, and stack operation. Other project examples will be presented and discussed that use serial communication, timers, and a simple multitasking executive to illustrate program/data representation, digital communication, optimization, and operating system principles. We will discuss ways micro projects can be integrated into systems courses at various levels of the curriculum (by varying scaffolding) or used as a framework for an embedded systems/physical computing course. In addition to handouts, we supply participants with the software and hardware for use during the workshop and sources for acquiring them for future classroom use. 

ABSTRACT. This workshop will provide an opportunity for attendees interested in adopting Peer Instruction (PI) to see a demonstration of PI, learn practical details about adopting PI, and an opportunity to write and critique PI questions. PI is an active learning technique with over 25 years of research supporting its efficacy in Physics Education. More recently, the CS Education community has found that the benefits of PI are true for CS as well, including lower WDF rates, higher exam scores, and improved retention in the CS major. One of the key differences between PI and traditional lecture is the use of a series of “clicker questions” in class to challenge the students’ conceptual understanding. Students discuss and answer these questions in small groups, then the instructor goes over the question with the entire class.