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Developing a repertoire of notional machines (i.e., pedagogical tools for teaching programming) is essential for new computer science (CS) educators. However, there is a lack of documentation of notional machines and related pedagogical content knowledge (i.e., insights into teaching CS content). Our experience report addresses this lack of documentation and captures insights from our professional learning community. We co-designed an approach to use physical objects to teach inheritance in Java. Unlike a research paper that would rigorously document a few student outcomes with the expectation that these would generalize, our experience report shares our observations from multiple years of teaching with the goal of providing a number of things for educators to consider when teaching inheritance in Java. Drawing from an analysis of our meeting notes, we describe our instructional sequence, our perceptions of its current strengths and weaknesses for supporting students’ learning, insights from our previous failed attempts, and eight pedagogical practices. 

This microteaching session is like Nifty Assignments for instruction. Instead of having the presenters just talk about their teaching, they will simulate how they would actually teach something. Covering a range of topics and grade levels, six educators will demo how they would teach a specific topic. To help identify the pedagogical practices that cut across grade bands and topics, the moderator, Colleen Lewis, will describe how their pedagogical practices connect with education research. The goal of the session is to inspire SIGCSE attendees by highlighting innovative instruction by exceptional educators. Attendees can adopt the content and/or pedagogical practices from each microteaching example. 

Stochastic resonance has been successfully used to improve human movement when using subthreshold vibration. Recent work has shown promise in improving mobility in individuals with unilateral lower limb amputations. Furthering this work, we present an investigation of two different signal structures in the use of stochastic resonance to improve mobility in individuals with unilateral lower limb amputations. Cutaneous somatosensation and standing balance measures using spatial and temporal analysis were assessed. There were no differences in the somatosensation measures, but differences in the temporal characteristics of the standing measures were seen with the various vibration structures when compared to no vibration, one of which suggesting mass may play an important role in determining who may or may not benefit from this intervention. Stochastic resonance employed with subthreshold vibration influences mobility in individuals with unilateral amputations, but the full direction and extent of influence is yet to be understood.