For computing to serve humanity, computing spaces must be safe for all individuals. While prior work has surfaced how hegemonic racial and gendered expectations manifest in computing, it has only indirectly attended to expectations surrounding neurodivergence. As computing stereotypes largely align with stereotypes of some neurodivergent…

The number of computer science (CS) courses has been dramatically expanding in U.S. high schools (HS). In comparison with well-established courses in mathematics and science, little is known about how the decisions made by HS CS teachers regarding how and what to teach impact student performance later in introductory college CS courses. Drawing on…

Educational technology offers several potential benefits for programming education. Still, to facilitate the technology properly, integration into a course must be carefully designed. In this article, we present a redesign of an object-oriented university-level programming course. In the redesign, a collaborative education tool was utilized to…

We present CSTutor, a sketch-based interface designed to help students understand data structures, specifically Linked Lists, Binary Search Trees, AVL Trees, and Heaps. CSTutor creates an environment that seamlessly combines a user's sketched diagram and code. In each of these data structure modes, the user can naturally sketch a data structure on…

We describe our experiences teaching MapReduce in a large undergraduate lecture course using public cloud services and the standard Hadoop API. Using the standard API, students directly experienced the quality of industrial big-data tools. Using the cloud, every student could carry out scalability benchmarking assignments on realistic hardware,…

Greedy algorithms constitute an apparently simple algorithm design technique, but its learning goals are not simple to achieve.We present a didacticmethod aimed at promoting active learning of greedy algorithms. The method is focused on the concept of selection function, and is based on explicit learning goals. It mainly consists of an…

Universal design (UD), a concept that grew from the field of architecture, has recently emerged as a paradigm for designing instructional methods, curriculum, and assessments that are welcoming and accessible to students with a wide range of characteristics, including those related to race, ethnicity, native language, gender, age, and disability.…