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This experience report is part of an ongoing NSF-funded grant project involving an alliance of six California State University campuses, aimed at promoting Latinx student retention through community engagement in early computer science courses. The project focuses on integrating socially responsible computing (SRC) into the curriculum to transform computing culture and invite marginalized students to participate. At our campus, we integrated SRC concepts into the CS2 course on Data Structures and Algorithms. Initially, SRC concepts were introduced into assignments and projects, which showed promising results but highlighted challenges: the assignments and projects were instructor-created, leading to a gap between students and the concepts. Students passively received topics without proactive participation, resulting in a lack of perceived real-world impact. To address this, we involved the local Latinx community directly. Students visited community partners to identify real-world problems, which they then addressed through term projects, ultimately presenting their solutions to the community. Adopting a startup mindset, students interviewed partners, identified problems, developed prototypes, and delivered solutions. This hands-on approach, first implemented in Spring 2024, significantly enhanced student engagement and provided practical, impactful learning experiences. This report details the course design, implementation process, formative data collected, and reflections on the outcomes. The findings offer valuable insights and recommendations for educators aiming to foster community engagement and socially responsible computing in computer science education, with a specific focus on promoting Latinx student retention. 

Background and Context.  Computing is considered a fundamental skill for civic engagement, self-expression, and employment opportunity. Despite this, there exist significant equity gaps in post-secondary computing enrollment and retention. Specifically, in the California State University (CSU) system, which serves close to half a million undergraduate students, students identifying as Hispanic/Latino make up a smaller percentage of CS majors than expected from the state’s overall population; and, once enrolled, tend to leave the CS major at higher rates than other students. Purpose.  We report on the impacts of a curricular intervention aimed at strengthening the sense of belonging of Hispanic/Latino students in computing, with the eventual goal of improving retention in computing majors for those students. Methods.  Working in an alliance of six universities within the CSU (five of which are designated as Hispanic-Serving Institutions), we have incorporated socially responsible computing across early CS courses. We aim for alignment between our curriculum and students’ communal goal orientations, and for coursework that attends to students’ interests, values, and cultural assets. Over a two-year-long study, we collected survey data to learn about the impact of our curricular intervention on students’ sense of belonging and perceived learning and agency. Findings.  We found that students generally reported high communal goal orientations and, at the campuseswithoutcompetitive enrollment policies, our intervention had a significant positive impact on students’ senses of belonging. This effect was observed between control and treatment terms as well as within treatment terms. We also note that Hispanic/Latino students were more likely than other students to report that non-curricular factors like work and family obligations interfered with their learning, and appeared to experience slightly stronger benefits from the intervention. Implications.  Our data suggest positive outcomes for integrating socially responsible computing into early CS courses, especially for Hispanic/Latino students at certain Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs). Unlike much prior research, we found that conducting studies outside of Primarily White Institutions (PWIs) can provide new insights into the impact of curricular interventions on student experience and retention. Our varying results by campus suggest that factors such as campus population, acceptance rate, and departmental enrollment policies ought to also be taken into account in studies that aim to broaden participation in computing. Would results from prior research on recruitment and retention of Hispanic/Latino students or other underrepresented students look different if such studies were replicated at institutions with different demographics and enrollment policies? 

Abstract The phytochrome (phy) family of sensory photoreceptors modulates developmental programs in response to ambient light. Phys also control gene expression in part by directly interacting with the bHLH class of transcription factors, PHYTOCHROME-INTERACTING FACTORS (PIFs), and inducing their rapid phosphorylation and degradation. Several kinases have been shown to phosphorylate PIFs and promote their degradation. However, the phosphatases that dephosphorylate PIFs are less understood. In this study, we describe 4 regulatory subunits of the Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) protein PHOSPHATASE 2A (PP2A) family (B′α, B′β, B″α, and B″β) that interact with PIF3 in yeast 2-hybrid, in vitro and in vivo assays. The pp2ab″αβ and b″αβ/b′αβ mutants display short hypocotyls, while the overexpression of the B subunits induces longer hypocotyls compared with the wild type (WT) under red light. The light-induced degradation of PIF3 is faster in the b″αβ/b′αβ quadruple mutant compared with that in the WT. Consistently, immunoprecipitated PP2A A and B subunits directly dephosphorylate PIF3-MYC in vitro. An RNA-sequencing analysis shows that B″α and B″β alter global gene expression in response to red light. PIFs (PIF1, PIF3, PIF4, and PIF5) are epistatic to these B subunits in regulating hypocotyl elongation under red light. Collectively, these data show an essential function of PP2A in dephosphorylating PIF3 to modulate photomorphogenesis in Arabidopsis.