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Creators/Authors contains: "Lau, Sam"

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  1. Generative AI (GenAI) is advancing rapidly, and the literature in computing education is expanding almost as quickly. Initial responses to GenAI tools were mixed between panic and utopian optimism. Many were fast to point out the opportunities and challenges of GenAI. Researchers reported that these new tools are capable of solving most introductory programming tasks and are causing disruptions throughout the curriculum. These tools can write and explain code, enhance error messages, create resources for instructors, and even provide feedback and help for students like a traditional teaching assistant. In 2024, new research started to emerge on the effects of GenAI usage in the computing classroom. These new data involve the use of GenAI to support classroom instruction at scale and to teach students how to code with GenAI. In support of the former, a new class of tools is emerging that can provide personalized feedback to students on their programming assignments or teach both programming and prompting skills at the same time. With the literature expanding so rapidly, this report aims to summarize and explain what is happening on the ground in computing classrooms. We provide a systematic literature review; a survey of educators and industry professionals; and interviews with educators using GenAI in their courses, educators studying GenAI, and researchers who create GenAI tools to support computing education. The triangulation of these methods and data sources expands the understanding of GenAI usage and perceptions at this critical moment for our community. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available January 22, 2026
  2. Over the past decade, data science courses have been growing more popular across university campuses. These courses often involve a mix of programming and statistics and are taught by instructors from diverse backgrounds. In our experiences launching a data science program at a large public U.S. university over the past four years, we noticed one central tension within many such courses: instructors must finely balance how much computing versus statistics to teach in the limited available time. In this experience report, we provide a detailed firsthand reflection on how we have personally balanced these two major topic areas within several offerings of a large introductory data science course that we taught and wrote an accompanying textbook for; our course has served several thousand students over the past four years. We present three case studies from our experiences to illustrate how computer science and statistics instructors approach data science differently on topics ranging from algorithmic depth to modeling to data acquisition. We then draw connections to deeper tradeoffs in data science to help guide instructors who design interdisciplinary courses. We conclude by suggesting ways that instructors can incorporate both computer science and statistics perspectives to improve data science teaching. 
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  3. null (Ed.)
    Explorable explanations (a.k.a. 'explorables') enable readers to learn concepts in domains such as math, physics, and the social sciences by interacting with live visualizations. Despite their popularity, there is currently a high barrier to creating explorables since one must be adept at UI and visualization programming. To learn about these challenges, we interviewed 6 educators who were interested in explorables but lacked the skills to create them from scratch. These interviews gave us design insights to lower some of these implementation barriers. We used these insights to create a live programming system called Data Theater that enables programmers to prototype explorables by writing their simulation logic in Python and mapping Python values to visualization elements using a declarative JSON grammar. To demonstrate the capabilities of Data Theater, we used it to recreate two of Bret Victor's original physics simulation explorables and found that our approach can lower the barriers to prototyping explorables. 
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