Proceedings of the 33rd SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education

Welcome to Northern Kentucky/The Southern Side of Cincinnati and to the Thirty-Third Annual Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. Prompted by the overflowing level of excitement of recent SIGCSE Symposia, this year's regular program extends an extra half day -- through Saturday afternoon. The program includes a wonderful collection of papers, panels, special sessions, forums, special activities for first-timers and students, poster presentations, birds-of-a-feather sessions, and plenary sessions. Additional workshops now start on Wednesday afternoon and evening, and continue through Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Many thanks to all contributors for their efforts. Special thanks to the SIGCSE 2002 committee -- particularly Symposium Co-Chairs, Judith Gersting and Renee McCauley, and Program Chair, Scott Grissom -- for putting such a terrific program together. This annual Symposium is the largest of the conferences that are sponsored by SIGCSE. Our next conference is the Seventh Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2002), to be held June 24-26, 2002, at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. Additional information on all SIGCSE activities may be found through the SIGCSE Web page at http://www.acm.org/sigcse/. On-going SIGCSE news is available through the SIGCSE list serve, SIGCSE.MEMBERS@aem.org. I f you are not already receiving messages, I encourage SIGCSE members to subscribe by following the links from the SIGCSE Web page! I also encourage you to talk with SIGCSE Board members throughout the Symposium and especially at the SIGCSE Business Meeting on Friday afternoon. Please plan on joining us as we consider fiature directions for SIGCSE. The annual SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education has long been recognized as the premier event in computer science education. We believe this year's symposium will uphold the standards of excellence established by the symposia of the past, thanks to the many people who participated in its creation. These include all of you who contributed papers, proposals for special sessions, panels, or workshops, those of you who served as reviewers, those who organized Birds of a Feather sessions or put together a faculty poster, or who brought student volunteers or volunteered to lead a student session. There is so much going on that SIGCSE 2002 is the first symposium to offer a schedule of three full days of technical sessions. The program includes 74 papers, 13 special sessions, 13 panels, 27 workshops, 28 faculty posters, 19 Birds-of-a- Feather sessions. There is a student track with 8 presentations designed specifically to serve the interests of the student attendee. Co-located events include the SIGCSE Doctoral Consortium and the ACM Student Research Contest. Elliot Soloway is the recipient of the 2002 SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education and is the keynote speaker, and Joe Turner is the recipient of the 2002 SIGCSE Award for Lifetime Service. Robert Martin, of Object Mentor, Incorporated, is the luncheon speaker. Exhibits feature new and exciting teaching materials in the form of textbooks, hardware, and software. The traditional reception offers opportunities for renewing old friendships and making new ones. The new Saturday afternoon Forums offer opportunities for spirited discussion on focused topics that we think will be of interest to all attendees. The Proceedings you are now reading is the written summary of many of these activities, yet it doesn't completely capture the excitement of SIGCSE 2002 and the dedication of the participants and the symposium planners. The planning of this event has been ongoing for two years and has involved the time and talents of many. Coordinating the reviewing process for this Symposium was a wonderful experience for me. Working with the other volunteers and reading the careful reviews submitted by so many people from around the world reinforced my pride and commitment to the SIGCSE community. The Symposium has gone completely 'paperless'. Almost all of the papers were submitted electronically and all of the reviews were completed online. All correspondence with authors, reviewers, committee members and session chairs was done via e-mail. There were 234 papers submitted with 73 accepted (31%). Authors represented eighteen countries: Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Pakistan, Scotland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. Over 400 reviewers completed over 1,100 reviews. Every paper had at least three blind reviews and most papers had four or five reviews completed. Program Committee members carefully read every review. Paper selection is always a difficult task. Unfortunately, we were forced to reject many qualified papers. Acceptance decisions were based on the overall quality of a paper but topic area was als0 considered to create a well-rounded program.