ABSTRACT. In 2005, the ACM, together with the IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Information Systems, released Computing Curricula 2005: The Overview Report[1]. This document has proven to be one of the most widely circulated and influential documents ever produced on the topic of computing curricula, and included computing programs in computer engineering (CE), computer science (CS), information systems (IS), information technology (IT), and software engineering (SE). This document was recently updated and released as Computing Curricula 2020: Paradigms for Global Computing Education[2], and included the first 5 computing programs as well as cybersecurity (CSEC) and some of data science (DS). This paper takes an IT-centric look at this updated document, highlighting the changes and the additional insights this significant reference provides the computing educational community.

ABSTRACT. Previous work has suggested that adopting a "syntax-first pedagogy" in introductory programming (CS1) improved student retention and performance. To confirm these results, we added syntax exercises to an existing CS1 course. A quasi-experimental design was used, with topics introduced with syntax exercises being compared to topics without a syntax-first introduction. Data from a previous offering of the course is used to establish a baseline for comparison. Data collected includes performance (number of submissions and time spent) on weekly exercises and assignments as well as student evaluations collected weekly and at the end of the term. Our observations suggest that a syntax-first approach improves student performance in the short-term. Students generally performed better on weekly exercises introduced using the syntax exercises, in terms of both the number of submissions required and time spent, than they did on exercises that were not. Furthermore, the reductions in time required to solve the existing weekly exercises partially offset the time required by the new syntax-focused exercises, and students, particularly those with less prior experience, valued the new syntax exercises. Our results suggest that adopting a syntax-first approach may have benefits for students with lower prior experience, and we encourage additional work, both to evaluate a fully-converted syntax-first course and to assess syntax exercises in a more controlled setting.

ABSTRACT. To meet the high demand for trained Cybersecurity professionals, many two-year colleges which have been offering degree programs in Information Technology (IT) are expanding or revising their course offerings to include Cybersecurity courses. The increasing importance of Cybersecurity skills has led to an increase in Cybersecurity requirements for IT majors. Due to considerations related to competency overlap, vendor-based academy content, government designations, faculty qualifications, general education requirements, enrollment capacity, and other factors, two-year colleges are evaluating various options for how to effectively offer both IT and Cybersecurity content. Options include separate IT and Cybersecurity degrees, IT and Cybersecurity concentrations using a common core of general Computing courses, and multiple IT degree concentrations based on a common IT core. Colleges should evaluate the competencies expected of completers to determine how to best structure their programs.

ABSTRACT. Emerging Technology (EmTech), like cybersecurity, data science, mobile development, machine learning, AI, and cloud computing, are expected to experience immense increases in job opportunities in coming years. While a variety of solutions are necessary to address the growing workforce needs in the EmTech industry, one of the largest untapped talent pools is women and underrepresented students. Clearly, HBCU and MSI hold great potential to broaden participation in EmTech because of their more diverse student populations, access to a large number of underrepresented students, and closer faculty-to-student interaction. However, faculties at these institutions, who are at the forefront of developing required skills in students are often overlooked. Faculties at these institutions need help designing and implementing effective and evidence-based instruction materials to develop skills that are in high-demand in the EmTech industry. The goal of this panel is to offer a discussion platform that can provide insight into the development and implementation of faculty professional development programs in EmTech in traditional institutions as well as within the context of HBCU and MSI.

ABSTRACT. Recent years have witnessed a rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their applications in various fields. At the same time, the utilization of UAVs also raises serious security and safety concerns. Given a large number of UAV-related jobs to be created in the near future, it is pressing to educate and train current and next-generation cybersecurity professionals towards UAVs and their applications. However, there is a lack of education and training materials on UAV cybersecurity, especially for hands-on practice. In this paper, we propose a novel UAV cybersecurity laboratory platform (UCLP), which provides efficient and effective hands-on practice. UCLP offers not only a cost-effective UAV cybersecurity practice environment, but also a series of designed and pre-configured lab modules. UCLP adopts a plug-in based design and hence supporting flexible customization of existing and new lab modules. UCLP uses technical solutions to overcome non-technical limitations in UAV cybersecurity practice (e.g., regulations of UAV operations). Our evaluation results demonstrated the efficiency, flexibility, and effectiveness of UCLP and indicated UCLP is promising to be integrated into the education and training of UAV, cybersecurity, and related fields.

ABSTRACT. We present Riposte, an online gamified learning platform for computer science and cybersecurity education. Exercises within the platform revolve around a custom 2D shoot 'em up game wherein students can demonstrate learned skills regarding password security, web security, traffic analysis, reverse engineering, cryptanalysis, and much more. In this paper. We describe some key features that together make our platform novel, including its distributed infrastructure, game engine, integrated development environment, automated feedback system, and support for individualization. We demonstrate how these features assist in the learning process --- both in theory and in practice --- and report on the use of the platform in a cybersecurity course at our university.

ABSTRACT. Fear appeals have been used for thousands of years to scare people into engaging in a specific behavior or omitting an existing one. From religion, public health campaigns, political ads, and most recently, cybersecurity, fear appeals are believed to be effective tools. However, this assumption is often grounded in intuition rather than evidence. We know little about the specific contexts within which fear appeals may or may not work. In this study, we begin to examine various components of a fear appeal within the context of password hygiene. A large-scale randomized controlled experiment was conducted with one control and three treatment groups: (1) fear only; (2) measures needed and the efficacy of such measures, and (3) fear combined with measures needed and the efficacy of such measures. The results suggest that the most effective way to employ a fear appeal within the cybersecurity domain is by ensuring that fear is not used on its own. Instead, it is important that information on the measures needed to address the threat and the efficacy of such measures is used in combination with information about the nature of the threat. Since many individuals that enter the information technology profession become the de facto security person, it is important for information technology education programs to distill in students the inadequacy of fear, on its own, in motivating secure actions.

ABSTRACT. The fundamentals of project management are the same regardless of the industry or organization. However, in some settings, individual elements of project management might become more or less important, and teaching students about contexts and domains that are familiar or of interest can help engage them. Our goal should be to maintain the fundamentals and incorporate a useful set of contexts and domains.

ABSTRACT. DevOps, the set of practices that combines software development and information technology operations, is beginning to transform teaching, learning, and research in higher education. Academic disciplines — and higher education institutions as a whole — have generally been slow to adopt DevOps. This lag is due to a wide array of challenges, including a general lack of awareness inside academia of what DevOps is and how it can be used. Early adopters across educational institutions worldwide have recognized the benefit of DevOps, not only for teaching coding itself but from a multitude of other disciplines and use cases. Forward-thinking departments that teach technology have completely shifted to the DevOps mindset. Instead of code being turned in on a hard drive or through a learning management system, early adopters have all assignments, code, tests, and assessments stored in an SCM with Git technology for distributed editing and version control. While the pedagogical benefits are clear, the advantages of DevOps in education extend to workforce development and increasing talent in the tech pipeline.

ABSTRACT. Does the current recommended computing curricula prepare our students to work in the business world? Technology does not exist in a silo. Technical employees work in departments, where they manage projects, people, and budgets. Many computing disciplines solely focus on the technological skills, completely ignoring the other skills necessary to be successful and to achieve upward mobility in the business world.

ABSTRACT. This presentation aims to discuss using hybrid approach to engage students’ active learning in IT course teachings. We introduce our practices and findings in teaching a core IT course in a hybrid class. We present the promising outcomes and aim to invoke discussions on the benefits and potential challenges in making IT classes hybrid.

ABSTRACT. Emerging technologies have become more complex and dynamic, making it difficult to predict what skills students will need for future employment.

Including classroom activities that encourage creativity and collaboration prepares students for Information Technology (IT) and real-life application of their networking skills. The Final Project for the Introduction to Networking course that is described in this paper was designed to be a creative teaching experience in the classroom. It contributes to the Introduction to Networking course learning outcomes by preparing students for risk-taking and uncertainty in real-world network applications.

ABSTRACT. The field of software technologies has been seeing a steady growth worldwide recently. Engineering job roles might require candidates to know several different programming paradigms, languages, frameworks, and cloud technologies. Each of these technologies constantly evolve to improve or become obsolete, which requires educational materials for teaching them to be constantly updated. Software engineering has classical texts that have been updated over many editions. These are large volumes with numerous chapters that include older and newer techniques, history, and a variety of extra material, which makes them expensive textbooks. This also make them contain too much material to cover in undergraduate courses. As published textbooks are always updated slower than the pace of technology that changes project dependencies every three months or so, practical materials may still become outdated between editions. Open educational resources (OERs) provide solutions to these problems by allowing adopters to update and customize materials for a given syllabus. An OER can simply mean a no-cost textbook or a resource that is publicly available for teaching. In this work, we present a preliminary OER for software development or engineering courses for undergraduate information technology (IT) majors.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a framework for the academic discipline of information technology. The framework defines four independent elements to the discipline: People, Information, Technology, and the Solutions or Needs that connect them. In the realm of IT practice, the information technology discipline aim is the selection, creation, integration, application, security, and administration of solutions that use technology to empower people through information. In the realm of IT research, the discipline aim is the investigation, discovery, and dissemination of needs that connect people, information, and technology. Solutions and needs are interconnected as needs derive solutions while solutions generate additional needs. The proposed framework presents a theory for the discipline of information technology to inform its research and practice. It builds on past efforts to define the information technology discipline and provides a foundation for academic institutions and the industry to proactively address the need for talent and innovation to grow and sustain the economic engine of our society.

ABSTRACT. Block-based programming languages are tools that allow the user to create working software products with little knowledge of the structure and syntax of a regular programming language. Block-based programming languages are tools that allow the user to create working software products with little knowledge of the structure and syntax of a regular programming language. in the last years, block-based programming languages have gained mainstream attention and a significant number of users around the world due to their accessibility and learnability.

In this article, we describe our experience designing and teaching a curriculum on mobile software development that has benefitted from the no-code philosophy leveraging the power of block-based programming tools. We review a journey of 10 years using block-based programming platforms to lay foundations on software development skills, and empower the creative potential of high school students. Our objective is to provide a review of the evolution, capabilities and technical coverage of the block-based software platforms, and to discuss the impact that we have observed on users and developers who have become acquainted on the use of block-based programming tools through our courses. Experiences such as impactful applications, peer to peer mentorship and creation of inclusive and diverse teams are examples of the positive impact that we have observed through our years leading and teaching a no-code curriculum.

ABSTRACT. Student engagement during online instruction has been a challenge. Particularly in an asynchronous learning environment, how to accurately assess and measure student engagement is a difficult task. This paper proposes a solution to fill in the gap between the need of evaluating student engagement during online instruction, and the lack of an effective method to do so. The proposed web-based learn- ing environment fully incorporates the latest development in facial expression recognition to capture the facial expression changes during the course of instruction. The facial expression data can then be visualized for further analysis to help instructors pinpoint the exact locations where the instruction needs improvements. In addition, the proposed system can be also used in corporate training settings, particularly in scenarios where the learners’ emotional responses are desired.

ABSTRACT. The introductory IT course (ITEC 101) was designed to build student’s excitement and interest in information technology and attract enrollment from students outside degree. In response to student feedback, the department felt it was time for an update. A survey was used to obtain student input on how well the current course met the course learning outcomes, the effectiveness of educational elements used in the course, and solicit opinions as to the positive and negative aspects of the course and recommendations for change. Qualitative and quantitative feedback collected from the survey suggests students prefer an active learning-based approach and want to spend time both in and outside of class on meaningful content and assignments. They want to be able to reflect on their learning experience and connect it to both upper-level courses and future careers. Based on this input the proposed course redesign uses an active learning approach incorporating a flipped classroom model to engage students and invigorate student enthusiasm for information technology. Contributions include student insights on topics that should be included in the course and their assessment of educational approaches' usefulness in delivering course content.

ABSTRACT. The author's approach in teaching databases, focuses on acquiring competences needed to use and develop systems of realistic complexity, typical for a micro or small company. Each student works towards gaining experience with various database designs and implementations, querying and development of relational schemas, and building an application. An open-source system is introduced, intended to help teachers organize such courses at a scale, and effectively guide the students in an iterative process of acquiring competencies, at the level of smaller groups or even individuals. The main goal of the system is speed-up of administrative tasks at all levels. The system implements the core process of organizing exams in a partial and piece-wise manner, and implements sets of tools and practices for semi-automated assessment processes.

ABSTRACT. This poster discusses some efforts to develop student skills with current IT workflow tools and processes. These experiences have been introduced within the context of existing courses rather than trying to add an additional course to already crowded curricula.

ABSTRACT. Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication takes place among a wide range of wireless nodes such as cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles. However, V2V systems are vulnerable to GPS spoofing attacks, which involve tricking a vehicle’s GPS sensor to use false information. The fake GPS messages can be used to alter the victim vehicle’s behavior, and even impersonate the victim vehicle, thus causing it to take actions imperiling traffic safety. In this work, we use the software as a platform to develop a theoretical foundation and implement a practical testbed to execute an impersonation attack along with an in-vehicle defense technique.

Simulation results showed that the spoofed GPS signal conveys a collision, while the actual distance between the attack and victim vehicles is at 450 micro degrees with a spoofing time around 7.7 seconds. To allow the victim vehicle to be aware of the potential collisions, we designed an In-Vehicle Anti Impersonation Attack reaction system, which is based on two factors in the vehicle's perception of a potential collision: Collinearity and Proximity. Using these parameters, the victim vehicle can calculate an anticipated "danger" level. Further, we studied the effect of the vehicle density and the number of lanes on the reaction system’s sensitivity to the danger level. We obtained very promising results.

ABSTRACT. Incorporating new collaborative learning strategies will definitely help increase students' engagement and improve the learning experience. In this paper, we present a new method of group formation that is inspired by the super-node topology in peer-to-peer systems. This method proved to enhance students engagement, productivity and cognitive skills in group work based assessments.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we present a preliminary inquiry into designing a technical support intervention for single fathers. We hope that such an intervention would make it easy for them to cope with the daily stressors of parenting and thus improve their mental health and their children's wellness. Currently there are not many support solutions specifically designed for single fathers. The project will use the Human-centered design methodology to engaged single fathers in multiple research activities to inform the design of a technical solution.

ABSTRACT. Students from the Technology Ambassadors Program (TAP) at Georgia Gwinnett College introduce basic programming concepts to online workshop participants by demonstrating and creating an interactive racing game using the Scratch programming language. The workshop encourages interest in the STEM fields, while teaching basic programming skills to control the game's logic. Our study results showed that our workshops were successful and engaging.

ABSTRACT. Information Technology (IT) remains one of the fastest-growing and most segregated professions in the United States. %Predominately white and male, opportunities in technology continue to grow exponentially. Areas such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for example are expected to become $11 trillion industries by 2025.

As companies struggle to find enough skilled candidates, we face the reality that African Americans are too often left behind. African Americans make up less than 5\% of the IT workforce and a small percentage of IT graduates. Although there is a general acknowledgment and some investment by both industry and educational institutions, there has been minimal success in changing the demographic landscape. This study focuses on the advent of bias conscious AI and how it can be used to better understand barriers to success, personalize student experiences, and provide pathways of attainment for an increasingly diverse student body.

ABSTRACT. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is changing the way we work, by automating mundane and repetitive tasks. RPA leverages software robots to interact with web and desktop applications just like humans do, through the user interface. In this workshop, UiPath will provide an overview of RPA and industry use cases, as well as hands-on exercises and knowledge on how to teach RPA to students.