This workshop is gathering key stakeholders and leaders in computing and information related disciplines to examine the education needs in these areas. Such a gathering is timely given that these critical fields have emerged as essential for the economic and technological health of the United States. The workshop participants are producing a white paper that documents the informed consensus of the computing community on a focused set of priorities and plan of action. The intellectual merit of the project lies in the fact that the computing community is diverse, with roots in several different disciplines and close relationships with many more. Hence the challenges and opportunities for ensuring that the field meets its education needs are complex, both technically and in terms of the coordinated interaction of groups that represent different constituencies with a variety of agendas. The workshop's broader impacts are being felt through its stimulation of collaboration among the diverse academic and practitioner groups within the computing community. In addition, there is a strong emphasis on ensuring representation of communities currently under represented in the computing and information fields, specifically women, blacks, and Hispanics. Moreover, the workshop report is stimulating action to reverse the current decline in the number of students in the computing pipeline.

The primary focus of this one-year activity will be workshops to bring together those in the computing education community, across the subdomains of that group, and others who are integrating the fruits of computational thinking into a wide variety of disciplines. It is common to find curricula in the arts (music, graphical design), business (accounting, economics), sciences (biology, chemistry, physics), and social sciences with computational courses in their curriculum. In the one year of this project, the workshops will focus on identifying the scope of the similarities and differences among these communities and in identifying ways in which the computing community can best serve the entirety of the expanded community. The project will begin the integration of the computing ontology into the organization of curricular materials and the use of social software to deliver essential information. A centralized website will provide RSS feeds with news about computing education, blog entries about computing education, links to resources, and other community oriented information (e.g., conference calendars). Workshop participants will include faculty from all of the computing disciplines, industry representatives, students, and faculty from disciplines we do not usually think of as computing intensive.

Computer Science (31) The "Educational Support for Testing Graphical User Interfaces" project is developing curricula materials to assist students in introductory programming courses in debugging graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Intellectual Merit: As educators push graphical interaction techniques down into introductory courses, a critical problem has emerged; while level-appropriate support exists for teaching students how to test internal classes and text-based programs, there is little level-appropriate support for beginning programmers to test their graphical user interfaces programs. This project is addressing this problem by developing a class library for debugging objectdraw, a widely used introductory-level Java GUI library, with the assistance of the Abbot package, an open-source JUnit extensions for GUI testing. Broader Impacts: This proposal is building a self-sustaining community of educators interested in resources for testing-based activities involving GUI-equipped programs. They are working with existing open-source software development projects in order to provide open access to their work. The project is encouraging members of underrepresented groups to continue in computer science by recruiting Hispanic graduate students from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Virginia Tech's Multicultural Academic Opportunities Program.

This project expands and fully implements Web-CAT, the Web-based Center for Automated Testing. Web-CAT is an innovative automated grading platform that focuses on how well students test their own code, rather than assessing the correctness of a program's output. Web-CAT encourages students to practice comprehension, analysis, and evaluation skills by forcing them to continually articulate their own understanding of how their code should behave. Students practice writing down hypotheses about how their code should behave, and then experimentally validate this understanding by executing their tests. Web-CAT has been formally evaluated at one institution and has been successfully adopted by three others. This project has four objectives: To expand Web-CAT from a proof of concept to a state where it can be distributed and applied widely, both by end-users who wish to automate their assignment grading practices, and by educational researchers who wish to build on this platform to develop and evaluate their own automated assessment techniques. To develop educational materials for instructors who want to use Web-CAT, including a comprehensive teaching manual capturing best practices, example assignments, how-to's on adapting existing assignments for automated assessment, and workshops for adopters. To develop a community of educators who want to use, extend, and support Web-CAT and the teaching strategies it enables. The community is supported by a wiki and a mailing list, together with birds of-a-feather-style meetings at professional events such as the SIGCSE Symposium. To evaluate the effectiveness of Web-CAT in a diverse set of contexts.

This Targeted Research project aims to investigate and develop technology that allows a college-level course website to be the hub of activity for students and faculty who want access to the National STEM Education Digital Library (NSDL). The end product is a flexible and personalized information-seeking interface that customizes interactions for educators and learners using the NSDL. To provide this functionality seamlessly in the existing NSDL infrastructure and prevailing usage contexts, the project team is: 1. Conducting user studies to learn about student and faculty needs and activities with regard to course websites; 2. Evaluating the composition of context-sensitive services to determine the most common interaction sequences requested by users and to "factor out" the necessary NSDL services that should be composed; and 3. Developing an integrated personalization framework, exploiting the commonality of personalized interaction in various settings and reflecting this commonality in a factored software architecture. Intellectual Merit: By bringing NSDL content to course websites, the reach of the NSDL is extended into the collegiate educational system. By studying specific technological ideas in concrete educational contexts, the project helps develop guidelines on how personalization technologies can usefully impact educational usage. Broader Impacts: For educators, the personalized information-seeking interfaces developed by this project are of direct benefit in improving course delivery, increasing automation, and enhancing information access. For learners, the project offers them the capabilities to find the resources and services they value, and makes NSDL sites more responsive to their needs. The operation of this project itself entails broadening aspects, such as increasing the participation of minority students and encouraging a wider use of existing NSDL resources. The project team is committed to increase the flow of graduate Hispanic students into the field of Computer Science.

This ITWF project provides significant research and mentoring to upper level undergraduate computer science students, with a focus on under-represented participants. The goal is for these students to pursue graduate degrees in information technology related fields and then pursue academic careers. This Scholars of the Future model is to be implemented at Auburn University all four years and at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in the last two years. The intellectual merit of this project lies in strong research basis and the expertise of the collaborative partners participating in the project. The project features an extremely comprehensive assessment plan that should provide research-based insights that are of great value. The student research covers a broad spectrum of the information technology discipline, with leadership and mentorship from recognized scholars in the various fields. The broader impacts of the project lie with the potential to produce a substantial number of computer science graduate students and potential faculty members, with many from underrepresented groups. In addition, the model is easily replicated at other institutions and could be sustained as part of the research programs at the institutions.