Shamrock Run and SIGCSE 2008

Susan Rodger and I, along with the entire steering committee and people from the City of Portland, OR have been working to put together SIGCSE 2008, and some of these efforts have been chronicled here in the Blog -- we also strongly encourage activities in conjunction with this conference -- hey, we'll all be together in a wonderful city, and we should get the most out of the time there!

In this vein, Owen Astrachan of Duke University has found a benefit race || run || fun walk on the Sunday morning right after the conference concludes. Known as the Shamrock Run, it provides another way to see Portland, to exercise and to support a noble cause.

To encourage participation, provide a sense of team (and save a few dollars :-), Owen recommends signing-up using the following team name and "leader":

name of the group: sigcse
leader of the group: owen

Use lowercase letters only: sigcse and owen

I have received permission from my boss* to run (actually, jog carefully :-). So please consider joining a few other SIGCSE people, even if just to cheer on the runners, perhaps we can all meet at the finish line for a photo (maybe the starting line would be a better idea). Thanks to Owen for getting the word out.

And please keep you eyes and mind open to other ideas to bring to our attention that might help make SIGCSE 2008 a memorable and successful event.
---
* my lovely wife Ellen

Sex, Computing and Achievement

So, I came across this article in Scientific American entitled, "Sex, Math and Scientific Achievement," with the subtitle, "Why do men dominate the fields of science, engineering and mathematics?"

First, I am glad to have been directed to the article by the ACM TechNews Service (that I wish would direct other computing professionals to SIGCSE 2008 -- hint, hint :-). Second, I am happy that the topic does directly address the Symposium theme regarding both diversity and accessibility, as well as (cap)abilities in the larger sense. And finally, I am glad they used "Sex" in the title so I could use it with some cover, and hopefully get more attention to the Symposium ;-). Not controversial enough -- sorry :-(.

I plan to re-read this substantive article, but the quick/incomplete summary goes like this:

• women talk gooder and are better at ... I think it's something about remembering
• men are better with what they can see, move and measure (perhaps a diagram would help, see right)
• intervention studies are still in their infancy but suggest both sexes can benefit from targeted training to improve their skill set

This final observation pertains most directly to the goals of the Symposium.

It seems that the motivation for this work involved a certain former Harvard president and his comments in 2005 at a small conference on economics. One of my favorites quotes from the article talked about the belief that differences between the skill sets for each sex are "mutable," and thus education matters:

Indeed, if training and experience did not make a difference in the development of our academic skills, universities such as Harvard would be accepting tuition from students under false pretenses.

There are some interesting observations about girls and boys where they are equally skilled on average but not "equally distributed" (my quotes) in mathematical ability. There are many other observations, including my other favorite quote:

Of course, even if you’re smart, you might not want to be a scientist.

Please note that I am pulling some items that caught my eye, but there are very many important points to discuss; for example, stereotypical bias in hiring and evaluation. I urge all SIGCSE 2008 attendees to find time to review, and I invite you to a conversation at one of the few coffee shops in Portland, my schedule permitting -- I am sure Susan Rodger will cover for me ....

December Announcements

In case you missed these SIGCSE 2008 announcements from Dec 3 .. compliments of Susan Rodger.

1. SIGCSE online program is now available!

PDFs of papers, panels, special sessions, workshops, Bofs and Posters
are now all available on the SIGCSE 2008 website.

Click on "Attendees" and then "Program at a Glance".

2. Paper Registration is available, online registration coming...

On the "Attendees" page, a paper registration form is available (pdf).
Online registration should be available soon.

Note the Early registration deadline is February 12! Rates are same as SIGCSE 2007 rates!

3. Online Registration for "CS Kids 4 Fun" care open - deadline Jan 10!

New this year we are offering onsite childcare/camp, "CS Kids 4 Fun",
for kids ages 6 months-12 years. We have contracted with "Kiddie Corp"
to provide the onsite daycare and will be using student volunteers to
do the CS activities (Alice, Scratch, CS Unplugged, etc.)

Contact Pam.Cutter@kzoo.edu if you have questions/comments.

4. Student Volunteers - Registration open - Encourage students to apply

Please encourage students to apply to be student volunteers. In exchange
for a few hours of service, they get free student registration.

New this year, some of them can spend those volunteer hours to
do fun CS activities with the older kids in our onsite
"CS Kids 4 Fun" daycare/camp.

5. Hotels - Comparisons and Why you should register in our SIGCSE block

We have three hotels listed on our web site and ask that you register
through our website or call and give the ACM Code listed for each hotel
to get the SIGCSE rate specified on our web pages.

Why should you register in the SIGCSE block instead of searching for
another rate through another provider?

Because the conference benefits by filling up our block at this rate (keeping overall costs low so we can keep registration as low as possible! -- J.D.).
We have several types of rates from $129/night to $96/night. Also consider the Roommate Database (link on our Attendees page) to find a roommate to cut costs.

6. Sign up for a Workshop on Wed, Fri or Sat evenings.

Consider signing up for one of our 38 offered workshops.
All workshop descriptions are available in the online program, and from the Attendees Page.
Workshop fees are the same rate as SIGCSE 2007!

7. Many Pre-conference events on Wednesday, March 12 -

Before making your plane reservations, consider coming Tuesday night
to take advantage of one of the pre-workshops during the day on
Wednesday, March 12.

See the SIGCSE 2008 home page for more information on
Wednesday pre-workshops.

a. Microsoft Pre-workshop on CS1/2 on XBOX console

TITLE: Developing CS1/2 Programming Assignments on the XBOX 360 Console

INSTRUCTOR: Prof. Kelvin Sung, Associate Professor, Computing and
Software, Systems University of Washington (Bothell)

This workshop is all day Wednesday til 5pm.

b. BlueJay/Greenfoot half-day pre-workshop

This workshop is for both beginners and experienced and will
be presented by the Bluejay and Greenfoot teams.

This half-day workshop is 1-5pm on Wednesday.

c. Pre-Workshop on Data Depository for Computing-Education Research

This full day workshop is being presented by Kate Sanders, Brad
Richards, and Jan Mostrom, and runs from 9am-6pm (with dinner 6-7).

d. Roundtable for Department Chairs (PDF download)

Register for this event in the SIGCSE registration. This is an all day event.

e. Doctoral Consortium

The Doctoral Consortium for PhD students continues. This is an all day event. Registration is closed.

Again, we hope to see many of you in Portland in March!

Susan and JD

ACM creates Education Policy Committee

More news today, and more topics for discussion at SIGCSE 2008 -- the ACM announced today a new committee to explore ways "to improve opportunities for quality education in computing and computer science." This announcement coincided (on purpose) with an announcement of the results of the 2006 Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA).

Well, just when I thought I had enough to keep abreast about in computing education -- fortunately, the first public appearance of the ACM EPC* will be a panel discussion at SIGCSE 2008, entitled "An Open Dialogue Concerning the State of Education Policy in Computer Science," with the session moderated by Robert B. Schnabel (photo left), Dean of the Indiana University School of Informatics and recently appointed Chair of the ACM EPC. By the way, as symposium chair I call "dibbs" on the doorway between this panel session and "Nifty Assignments" ;-).

From my quick read, the goals of the EPC overlap substantially with SIGCSE and other organization like CSTA, CCSC and SIGITE. Personally (but in a professional way), I applaud this effort as many of us at the undergraduate and graduate level believe (albeit mostly anecdotally) that many of the issues that arise involving enrollments occur outside of the university, and with the right support we could all benefit from a more coordinated approach.

On the other hand, there is the old saw that when there's a problem perceived, form another committee ... :-( -- the EPC will only be able to make real impact with some informed discussion and support to implement the recommendations (sounds familiar to me).

Just another reason to meet us all in Portland in March for SIGCSE 2008.
__

* just a warning, our campus uses EPC for its Educational Policy Committee and I already have enough confusion in my life :-)

A Fine Pair of Fellows ...

The ACM has just announced its list of 2007 ACM Fellows, and two names stand out for computing education in general, and for SIGCSE 2008, particularly the keynotes (see below).

Eric Roberts of Stanford University (photo left) has served the SIGCSE community for many years, spearheading such important (and gi-normous*) projects as Computing Curricula 2001 and the ACM Java Task Force (with my co-chair Susan Rodger). Eric received the 2003 SIGCSE Award in Reno, Nevada (where I recall his keynote did address diversity issues in computing education). Rumor has it that Eric taught a computing course for non-majors at Stanford that included Marissa Mayer, one of the SIGCSE 2008 keynotes -- clearly, Eric made the course more than accessible.

SIGCSE 2008 treasurer Scott Grissom told me about a game played at a past SIGCSE where each person names the most famous person who knows you by name -- Eric purportedly started with Bill Gates of Microsoft (yes, the "of Microsoft" part is unnecessary, but ...), but then added Condoleezza Rice of Stanford and "other stuff" -- when it was his turn to name a famous person who knows him, Scott wisely chose Eric Roberts.

The second new ACM Fellow connected (directly) to SIGCSE 2008 is none other than Randy Pausch of CMU (photo right). You can visit previous posts here or here or here to get Randy's background and his bittersweet, very emotional story. Randy will provide the opening keynote address at SIGCSE 2008; we are hoping this keynote is provided in person. Just to be complete, Randy has received the 2008 SIGCSE Award and the 2007 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award as well.

On behalf of SIGCSE, well done to both Fellows.
___

* so big a project I had to squeeze "gigantic" and "enormous" into one adjective :-)

Child Care / Kid Camps announced ...

Finally! We (mostly Susan and Pam, see below) have been exploring an on site child care center and kid camp for SIGCSE 2008 for a few weeks (it was noted on the conference homepage and attendees page) -- details below in Susan's announcement to the SIGCSE listserv, but I am excited at extending the notion of a "SIGCSE Family" to be more inclusive than it already is -- also, I should emphasize that "on site" really means "on site"; the camp will be on the same level of the OCC as the meetings and exhibits (but secluded enough to not disturb meetings ;-).

---

New at SIGCSE 2008 this year, we are in the process of finalizing details for onsite childcare and kid CS camp during the conference, for ages 6 months-12 years (contact us if there is interest in kids older).

DEADLINE for applications: January 10, 2008!

We need to have at least 12 kids signed up by January 10 to guarantee this program. If there is low enrollment, then we may need to cancel.

Here are some of the details for what we are planning. More details and online applications will be available in the next few weeks.

We are contracting with a professional provider who provides onsite care at conferences. (similar to Kids Chi Camp at SIGCHI or the childcare at Grace Hopper). The daycare/kid's camp will be one of the meeting rooms at the convention center, but will be transformed into a fun place for kids.

Younger kids will participate in drama, play, and arts and crafts type activities. As part of the care, older kids can participate in our CS kids activities. We are investigating activities such as CS Unplugged, Scratch, Alice, etc. Student Volunteers will help with the CS activities.

Daycare provider ratios will be 1:2 for kids ages 6 months-11 months, 1:3 for kids 1 to 2 years old, and 1:5 for ages 3-12. Student volunteers for the CS activities will be additional helpers and are not included in this ratio.

Daycare will be provided during the main sessions from

• Thursday, March 13 8am-1pm, 1pm-6pm (whole, half day options)
• Friday, March 14 8am-1pm, 1pm-6pm (whole, half day options)
• Saturday, March 15 8-4pm

This care will be subsidized and you pay for a whole or half session at the rate of

• $6/hr for ages 3-12, and
• $7/hr for ages 6 months-2yr.

We hope to send out more information when our application goes online.

CONTACT: Pam Cutter, Pam.Cutter@kzoo.edu, will be our Childcare/Camp Arrangements contact. Please contact her if you have any questions, ideas, or concerns.

We hope this subsidized daycare/camp will make SIGCSE more accessible to our attendees. We both hope to bring our kids to SIGCSE 2008 to participate in this new experience for kids.

Susan and JD

Accessibility in the News today ...

Accessibility involving computing has been quite a topic in the news today. I will just highlight a few noteworthy examples here, not all of which involve education but can be argued provide the potential to increase the diversity of the user population of computing (hint: diversity and accessibility are connected by more than the theme of SIGCSE 2008 :-).

• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette has a nice story about the new Quality of Life Technology Center shared between the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.
• A group of researchers from JHU, CCNY, Northwestern and the University of Maryland-College Park are working on a surface to facilitate a tactile interface for users with vision impairment.
• Science Daily reports on an IBM project to develop a system that can be manipulated by thought (honest).
• And of course, production has begun on the OLPC device (XO), which has also been a topic recently on the SIGCSE listserv.

Providing a low-cost computing device to make information and the Internet more accessible -- who could argue with that? Well, apparently, there is competition in this area.

I am not an economist, so I am not going to comment on the relative merits of such competition. But as a teacher, I think the discussion itself has merit in computing education, especially when we read about the anticipated high demand for computer science people (or "High-demand employment requires high-caliber education") and the benefits such access can provide to all, including those in developing countries (yes, there are consequences too, which is why the discussion is non-trivial).

And clearly accessibility is not limited to those with mobility, vision or hearing issues either. I would be happy to be involved with a SIGCSE conference that facilitated discussion(s) on access around the world, the issues that arise across cultures and political systems, legality, social impact -- hey, I work at a liberal arts college, and I believe computing has much to offer these discussions.

Still, the resources (time, space, energy, pages) at a SIGCSE conference are limited, no matter how many "threads of discussion" are processing. I look forward to learning about initiatives to provide low-cost computing around the globe, and SIGCSE 2008 can be one of the places where I learn more about this topic.

Villanova in the Fall …

Last Friday, computing educators in the Greater Philadelphia Area, also known as the Delaware Valley, gathered at the Conference Center at Villanova University just west of Philadelphia, PA USA (hey, blogs are international :-). Our hosts, Boots Cassel of VU and Manuel Perez-Quinones of VT, used funding from their NSF-CPATH grant to arrange this meeting. All participants submitted background information, current projects and future endeavors from which a tentative agenda was gleaned.

We all met on a crisp autumn day (the colors were astounding!), and immediately got down to work over breakfast. After a sequence of substantial introductions, the floor was open for discussion. We talked about perceptions, priorities, goals, practicalities, diversity and motivations involved in computing education. Other efforts from other disciplines were noted (including Eric Mazur’s work in concept physics at Harvard).

Before we knew it, it was lunchtime -- more food, and more conversation. The afternoon went by as rapidly as the morning, though Boots was able to at least list and reminder everyone of the agenda items. We discussed discovery learning, virtual worlds and robotics, kinesthetic learning and PBSL, whatever came into the stream of the discussion among motivated people. I then realized that our hosts were also demonstrating some of these forms of learning in practice that day: we held loosely to an agenda, we facilitated and provided with surroundings conducive to activity, and then set off to explore. We had lived the ideal, and I was renewed once again, looking forward to returning to Haverford to see if I could implement some of these strategies.

I recall feeling that I was experiencing one of my favorite parts of the SIGCSE conference; namely, the ongoing discussion towards a set of goals, some immediate, some longer term. I believe that this meeting was made more effective because the majority of participants were “SIGCSE regulars” – and the rest of the people were constantly reminded that they should attend SIGCSE soon. I was able to distribute about 30-40 roses as reminders of the City of Portland, OR, home of SIGCSE 2008. I look forward to progress reports and more lively chat (in the real world :-) in a few months at the Oregon Convention Center.

NCWIT report from Seattle

This Blog post is contributed by my esteemed co-chair Susan Rodger -- it took me a few days to post it into this Blog, but I do believe it is worth the brief wait -- the goals of NCWIT line up well with those of SIGCSE in general, and SIGCSE 2008 in particular -- Enjoy, J.D.

---

I just got back from my first NCWIT meeting held in Seattle, Washington. NCWIT stands for National Center for Women & Information Technology. They have been meeting since May 2005, and Duke has been a member, but this is my first time in attending. There were 200-300 people attending, all dedicated to increasing interest in IT.

As I saw at the meeting, NCWIT has been very active in producing many products to attract women to IT. For example, they have created Program-in-a-Box programs to provide all the materials you need for a presentation on a topic such as outreach. The "box" is actually just online resources, easily accessible.

An example is "Outreach-In-A-Box: Discovering IT"

This box has lots of materials to help provide you with an outreach presentation to a middle school including sample letters to introduce yourself to the school, activites you can do with kids, presentation slides, and a tech brochure.

The NCWIT meeting had a practices workshop for all the attendees that was held at Microsoft and included two Keynote speakers. Curt Coffman, the author of the best-seller First Break All the Rules gave a very lively talk on attracting and engaging talented people with many great suggestions. The second keynote speaker was Evelynn Hammonds from Harvard who spoke about rationale for diversity in science and technology.

NCWIT has several alliances, Academic, K-12, Workforce and Entreprenurial. As part of the meeting the individual alliances meet. Duke is a member of the Acadmic Alliance. This alliance met to discuss issues on recruiting, curriculum, and climate.

As part of every NCWIT meeting, there is an awards ceremony for recognizing young women at the high-school level for their computing-related achievements and interests. On the second day of NCWIT, the awards ceremony was held at the University of Washington.

If you are not a member of NCWIT, consider joining one of the alliances. They have two meetings a year and have created an enormous amount of resources for diversity in the pipeline at all levels.

NCWIT will be attending SIGCSE 2008, so stop by and talk to NCWIT representatives to find out more about the NCWIT meetings and alliances.

-- Susan

2008 SIGCSE Awards Announced

Just last week we discovered the names of the 2008 SIGCSE Awards, and I am proud to be chair of the conference where these awards will be presented.

The SIGCSE Award is presented to the person who has made a substantial and lasting impact on computing education. Randy Pausch (photo left), a name most recently posted here in this Blog, is the 2008 recipient for his contributions, especially the Alice virtual world environment for introducing many potential computing students to the wonderful world of programming. And in Alice, it can be as wonderful, rich, visual and musical a world as the creativity of the student can provide.

For example, I have used Alice in a CS0 course at Haverford, and been surprised at the range of students that are engaged by this tool. If you have Alice installed (Windows or Windows; Linux is a challenge ;-), you're invited to download and hear Charles Babbage sing Karaoke (13 Mb) by one of my CS majors (yes, he started in CS0 and switched to CS1, ...).

The 2008 recipient of the SIGCSE Award for Lifetime Service is Dennis J. Frailey (photo right) of Raytheon and of Southern Methodist University. Dennis has also made many contributions to SIGCSE, but I have seen his ideas shared during discussions of the "math-thinking" discussion group hosted by Doug Baldwin and championed by people like Peter Henderson.

On behalf of the SIGCSE 2008 steering committee, our sincere congratulations, we are now even more excited about the upcoming symposium in Portland.

I do recommend checking here and at the SIGCSE 2008 website, there is much preparation underway, and with the BOF/poster deadlines tomorrow, there will likely be more than I have time for (nicely ending with a split infinitive & a preposition ;-).