ConferenceSIGCSE Virtual 2024

Papers

Position and Curricula Initiative

The primary purpose of Position and Curricula Initiative (PCI) papers is to present a coherent argument about a computing education topic, including, but not limited to curriculum or program design, practical and social issues facing computing educators, and critiques of existing practices. PCI papers should substantiate their claims using evidence in the form of thorough literature reviews, analysis of secondary data collected by others, or another appropriate rhetorical approach. PCI contributions should be motivated by prior literature and should highlight the novelty of the presented work. However, in contrast to Computing Education Research (CER) papers, PCI papers need not present original data or adhere to typical rigorous qualitative or quantitative research methods. Moreover, PCI papers differ from Experience Report and Tools (ERT) papers in that they do not necessarily report on individual experiences, programs or tools, but rather they may focus on broader concerns to the community. The PCI papers are limited to 3 pages plus references.

If you have questions about any of these policies, please contact sigcsevirtual2024-program@sigcse.org for clarification prior to submission.

Computing Education Research

The primary purpose of Computing Education Research (CER) papers is to advance what is known about the teaching and learning of computing. CER papers are reviewed relative to the clarity of the research questions posed, the relevance of the work in light of prior literature and theory, the soundness of the methods to address the questions posed, and the overall contribution. Both qualitative and quantitative research is welcomed, as are replication studies and papers that present null or negative results. The CER papers are limited to 6 pages plus references.

If you have questions about any of these policies, please contact sigcsevirtual2024-program@sigcse.org for clarification prior to submission.

Experience Reports and Tools

The primary purpose of Experience Reports and Tools (ERT) papers is observational in nature, and ERT papers should carefully describe the development and use of a computing education approach or tool, the context of its use including the formative data collected, and provide a rich reflection on what did or didn’t work, and why. ERT contributions should be motivated by prior literature and should highlight the novelty of the experience or tool presented. ERT papers differ from CER papers in that they frame their contributions to enable adoption by other practitioners, rather than focusing on the generalizability or transferability of findings, or threats to validity. The ERT papers are limited to 6 pages plus references.

If you have questions about any of these policies, please contact sigcsevirtual2024-program@sigcse.org for clarification prior to submission.

Panels

Panel sessions provide an opportunity for expert panelists to present their views on a specific topic, and then to virtually discuss these views among themselves and with the audience. A panel session starts with a brief introduction of the topic by the panel moderator, followed by short presentations by the panelists giving their views. Panel sessions are scheduled for 60 minutes total, but keep in mind that successful panels must allow sufficient opportunity (at least 20 minutes) for an interactive question-and-answer period involving both the panelists and the virtual audience.

When assembling a panel, we encourage authors to carefully consider ACM’s guidance for Building Diverse Teams. A typical panel will consist of four participants, including the moderator. Limiting a panel to four participants allows sufficient time for audience questions. Proposals with more than four panelists must convincingly show that all panelists will be able to speak, and the audience able to respond, within the session time. All panels will follow a synchronous format. The panel presentation time will ideally be coordinated with the time zone convenient to the institution of the lead panelist.

If you have questions about any of these policies, please contact sigcsevirtual2024-panels@sigcse.org for clarification prior to submission.

Lightning Talks

Lightning Talks are expected to explore tentative or preliminary work, or even ideas for possible work. Lightning Talks describe works in progress (tentative or preliminary work), new and untested ideas (ideas for possible work), or opportunities for collaborative work. Presentations of mature work will not be considered. The purpose of a Lightning Talk can be to start a discussion, find collaborators, or receive input and critique about an idea.

Talks will be followed by a question and answer “poster session” allowing “give and take” with conference attendees allowing a chance to discuss and receive feedback on work in progress that has not been fully developed into a paper. Ideas for lightning talks and posters should not be previously published, as a paper or a poster.

If you have questions about any of these policies, please contact sigcsevirtual2024-lt-posters@sigcse.org for clarification prior to submission.

Additional Notes

Authors submitting work to SIGCSE Virtual 2024 are responsible for complying with all applicable conference authorship policies and those articulated by ACM. If you have questions about any of these policies, please contact sigcsevirtual2024-program@sigcse.org for clarification prior to submission.

ACM has made a commitment to collect ORCiD IDs from all published authors (https://authors.acm.org/author-resources/orcid-faqs). All authors on each submission must have an ORCiD ID (https://orcid.org/register) in order to complete the submission process. Please make sure to get your ORCiD ID in advance of submitting your work.

Accepted Papers

Call for Submissions

SIGCSE Virtual 2024

The SIGCSE Virtual conference is organized by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) and is the organization’s newest conference. SIGCSE Virtual addresses issues common among educators working to develop, implement, and/or evaluate computing programs, curricula, and courses, as well as broadening participation in computing and making it more inclusive. The conference provides a forum for sharing new ideas for syllabi, laboratories, and other elements of teaching and pedagogy, at all levels of instruction. We endeavor to have a diverse selection of technical sessions and opportunities for learning and interaction.

SIGCSE Virtual 2024 will be held from 5–7 December 2024.

SIGCSE Virtual 2024 will be a purely virtual event. Online participants will be able to participate in:

• Keynotes
• Papers
• Doctoral Consortium
• Panels
• Lightning Talks/Posters

Online registration will be significantly cheaper than SIGCSE’s other conferences. Our hope is that this will allow everyone to present their work at SIGCSE Virtual 2024, as there will be no travel costs associated with participation!

Submission Information

• We will use Easychair for SIGCSE Virtual 2024.
• We will use the ACM two-column format for papers, panels, and the Doctoral Consortium.
• Submission Link: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=sigcsevirtual2024
• To volunteer to review for SIGCSE Virtual 2024, please visit https://tinyurl.com/SIGCSE-VIRTUAL-REV.

Keynotes: The keynotes will be available as a video ahead of time to conference attendees. The actual keynote slot will be focused on Q&A with the keynote presenter. Attendees, please watch the keynote in advance, and bring your questions to ask the presenter!

Papers: Papers will be accepted in two categories: experience reports and research papers. We will ask authors to prepare a 10-15 minute presentation video, which will be available to conference attendees. The 20-minute paper “presentation” time will start with a 5-minute live presentation by the author(s) summarizing the paper’s major results. The bulk of the time will be available for Q&A with the author, and discussions among the attendees.

Doctoral Consortium: Details are coming soon! We’ll also soon share deadline details.

Panels: Panel sessions provide an opportunity for expert panelists to present their views on a specific topic, and then to discuss these views among themselves and with the audience. Please note that we will try to coordinate the panel presentation time with the time zone convenient to the institution of the lead panelist.

Lightning Talks and Posters: The five-minute lightning talks will be followed by poster sessions led by the lightning talk presenter. The “poster session” will be held in several breakout rooms where interested conference attendees will have the opportunity for discussion with the presenter. We expect these new combined lightning talks/posters to include both less fully-developed research ideas (typically the domain of posters) as well as new ideas (typically the domain of lightning talks).

Important information about conference times: Since this conference will have attendees from around the world across many time zones, we expect one day of the conference to be held at a time most convenient to attendees from North and South America, one day of the conference to be held at a time most convenient to attendees from Europe and Africa, and one day of the conference to be held at a time most convenient to attendees from Asia and Australasia. Specific timings of presentations will depend on how many papers, panels and lightning talks/posters get accepted from a particular region. Presenter preference will be considered when setting presentation times.

Important Dates

For SIGCSE Virtual, we try to obtain three or more reviews per submission. For the paper track, many reviewers prefer to review only three submissions. (Since submissions for other tracks are much shorter, reviewers often review more submissions.) That means we need about the same number of reviewers as submissions. This year, we are asking (but not requiring) each submission to designate at least one author who is also willing to review for the conference. Note that undergraduate students cannot be reviewers.

Interested reviewers should fill in the form at: https://tinyurl.com/SIGCSE-VIRTUAL-REV. Please direct questions or concerns to sigcsevirtual2024-program@sigcse.org.

SIGCSE Virtual 2024 papers will not be open access. SIGCSE is part of the Open Surround program https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess#h-acm-opensurround-service. The SIGCSE Virtual 2024 papers will be freely available to the world via the DL for one month surrounding the conference.

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Abstracts

All papers must have a plain-text abstract of up to 250 words. Abstracts should not contain subheadings or citations. The abstract should be submitted in EasyChair along with paper metadata, and the same text should be included in the PDF version of the full paper at the appropriate location.

Submission Templates

SIGCSE Virtual 2024 is NOT participating in the new ACM TAPS workflow, template, and production system.

All paper submissions must be in English and formatted using the 2-column ACM SIG Conference Proceedings format and US letter size pages (8.5x11 inch or 215.9 x 279.4mm).

Here is an annotated PDF example that has some notes/tips and shows the required sections.

Page Limits: Papers are limited to a maximum of 6 pages of body content (including all titles, author information, abstract, main text, tables and illustrations, acknowledgements, and supplemental material). One additional page may be included which contains only references. If included, appendix materials MUST NOT be present on the optional references page.

MS Word Authors: Please use the interim Word template provided by ACM.

LaTeX Authors:

• Overleaf provides a suitable two-column sig conference proceedings template.
• Please do not use the anonymous document class option, as counter-intuitive as that sounds. We’d like to ensure that author blocks appear in the submission, and that option removes them.
• Other LaTeX users may alternatively use the ACM Primary template, adding the “sigconf” format option in the documentclass to obtain the 2-column format. (ACM has recently changed the ACM template and we have not yet had a chance to verify that the new version works correctly.)
• NOTE: The default LaTeX template text shows appendix materials following the references. SIGCSE Virtual 2024 does not permit appendices on the optional page allotted for references. Authors must include all relevant content within the 6 body pages of the paper. References are the ONLY thing that can be added on page 7.

Requirements for Double Anonymous Review Process: At the time of submission all entries must include blank space for all anonymous author information (or anonymized author name, institution, location, and email address), followed by an abstract, keywords, CCS Concepts, placeholders for the ACM Reference Format and copyright blocks, and references. For anonymized submissions, all blank space necessary for all author information must be reserved under the Title, or fully anonymized text can take its place (e.g. 4 lines containing Author1, Author1Institution, Author1Location, anon1@university.edu. In addition, please leave enough blank space for what you intend to include for Acknowledgements but do not include the text, especially names and granting agencies and grant numbers. Acknowledgements should be included in the first 6 pages.

Other requirements: Please provide a separate block for each author, including name, email, institution, location, and country, even if authors share an institution.

Desk Rejects: Papers that do not adhere to page limits or formatting requirements will be desk rejected without review.

Accessibility: SIGCSE Virtual 2024 authors are strongly encouraged to prepare submissions using these templates in such a manner that the content is widely accessible to potential reviewers, track chairs, and readers. Please see these resources for preparing an accessible submission.

Double Anonymized Review

Authors must submit ONLY an anonymized version of the paper. The goal of the anonymized version is to, as much as possible, provide the author(s) of the paper with an unbiased review. The anonymized version must have ALL mentions of the authors removed (including author’s names and affiliation plus identifying information within the body of the paper such as websites or related publications). However, authors are reminded to leave sufficient space in the submitted manuscripts to accommodate author information either at the beginning or end of the paper. LaTeX/Overleaf users are welcome to use the anonymous option, but are reminded that sufficient room must exist in the 6 body pages to include all author blocks when that option is removed. Authors may choose to use placeholder text in the author information block, but we encourage authors to use obviously anonymized placeholders like “Author 1”, “Affiliation 1”, etc.

Self-citations need not be removed if they are worded so that the reviewer doesn’t know if the writer is citing themselves. That is, instead of writing “We reported on our first experiment in 2017 in a previous paper [1]”, the writer might write “In 2017, an initial experiment was done in this area as reported in [1].

As per ACM guidelines, authors may distribute a preprint of their work on ArXiv.org. However, to ensure the anonymity of the process, we ask that you not publish your work until after you receive the accept/reject notice. If particular aspects of your paper require earlier distribution of the preprint, please consider changing the title and abstract so that reviewers do not inadvertently discover your identity.

Submissions to the Papers tracks are reviewed with the dual-anonymous review process. The reviewers and meta-reviewers (i.e. associate program chairs or APCs) are unaware of the author identities, and reviewers and APCs are anonymous to each other and to the authors.

The reviewing process includes a discussion phase after initial reviews have been posted. During this time, the reviewers and APC can examine all reviews and privately discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the work in an anonymous manner through EasyChair. Following discussion, the APC shall draft a meta-review that holistically captures the group position on the paper, incorporating views raised in the reviews and during the discussion phase.

The SIGCSE Virtual 2024 review process does not have a rebuttal period for authors to respond to comments, and all acceptance decisions are final.

ACM Policies

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

ORCiD IDs

ACM has made a commitment to collect ORCiD IDs from all published authors (https://authors.acm.org/author-resources/orcid-faqs). All authors on each submission must have an ORCiD ID (https://orcid.org/register) in order to complete the submission process. Please make sure to get your ORCiD ID in advance of submitting your work. (If EasyChair does not request the ORCiD ID for your coauthors, you do not need to find a way to enter one.)

Abstracts

All panel submissions must have a plain-text abstract of up to 250 words. Abstracts should not contain subheadings or citations. The abstract should be submitted in EasyChair along with the submission metadata, and it should be included in the PDF version of the submission at the appropriate location.

Submission Templates

SIGCSE Virtual 2024 is NOT participating in the new ACM TAPS workflow, template, and production system.

All panel submissions must be in English and formatted using the 2-column ACM SIG Conference Proceedings format and US letter size pages (8.5x11 inch or 215.9 x 279.4mm).

Page Limits: Panel submissions are limited to a maximum of 2 pages of body content (including all titles, author information, abstract, main text, tables and illustrations, acknowledgements, and references).

Here is an annotated PDF example for Panel Submissions that has some notes/tips and shows the required sections.

MS Word Authors: Please use the interim Word template provided by ACM.

LaTeX Authors:

• Overleaf provides a suitable two-column sig conference proceedings template.
• Other LaTeX users may alternatively use the ACM Primary template, adding the “sigconf” format option in the documentclass to obtain the 2-column format.

Requirement for Single Anonymous Review Process: At the time of submission all entries should include author information, an abstract, body content, references, and placeholders for the ACM Reference Format and copyright blocks. Each author should be defined separately for accurate metadata identification.

Other requirements: Include space for authors’ e-mail addresses whenever possible on separate lines. Even if multiple authors have the same affiliation, grouping authors’ names or e-mail addresses, or providing an ‘e-mail alias’ is not acceptable, e.g., {brian,lina,leenkiat}@university.edu or firstname.lastname@college.org. Panel submissions should include from the standard ACM template: keywords, CCS Concepts and ACM Reference Format.

Desk Rejects: Submissions that do not adhere to page limits or formatting requirements will be desk rejected without review.

Accessibility: SIGCSE Virtual 2024 authors are strongly encouraged to prepare submissions using these templates in such a manner that the content is widely accessible to potential reviewers, track chairs, and readers. Please see these resources for preparing an accessible submission.

Additional Format Instructions

Authors submitting a panel should use the standardized section names and additional formatting information when preparing their proposals.

• When providing author information, indicate which of the panelists is the moderator by placing the word “Moderator” in parentheses after their name.
• Abstract: Should provide a brief summary (up to 250 words) of your panel.
• Summary: The first section should be titled Summary and should provide an expanded summary of the panel’s goals, intended audience, and relevance to the SIGCSE community.
• Panel Structure: The section following the summary should explain the panel structure and plan for audience participation, and provide sufficient time for audience interaction and questions.
• Position Statements: The subsequent sections should contain the position statements of each panelist and a brief description of their expertise and background as it relates to the panel. Title each section by identifying the panelist.
• References: Citing relevant work where appropriate is encouraged, but not required. If references are included, they should be placed in a separate section titled References and should follow the ACM formatting guidelines.

Single Anonymized Review

Submissions of a panel are reviewed with the single-anonymous review process. Submissions should include author names and affiliations. Thus, the author identities are known to reviewers, but reviewers are anonymous to each other and to the authors.

The reviewing process includes a discussion phase after initial reviews have been submitted. During this time, the reviewers can examine all reviews and privately discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the work in an anonymous manner through EasyChair. This discussion information can be used by the track chairs in addition to the content of the review in making final acceptance decisions.

The SIGCSE Virtual 2024 review process does not have a rebuttal period for authors to respond to comments, and all acceptance decisions are final.

ACM Policies

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

ORCID ID

ACM has made a commitment to collect ORCiD IDs from all published authors (https://authors.acm.org/author-resources/orcid-faqs). All authors on each submission must have an ORCiD ID (https://orcid.org/register) in order to complete the submission process. Please make sure to get your ORCID ID in advance of submitting your work.