There are many excellent reasons for incorporating social good activities throughout our CS curricula. Possibly the most important are the large number of pressing local/global issues facing society (e.g. climate change and related issues) which deserve the attention of the computing community, and in turn, demand the attention of computing educators. In addition, research suggests focusing on how computing can affect the social good can help broaden participation in computing.

The problem is many CS educators both don’t know where to start or how to create programming assignments around socially relevant themes, and believe that such activities can only be undertaken by advanced students in upper division courses, e.g. software engineering and capstone courses. The purpose of this special session is to equip participants with the easy to learn skills so they can begin incorporating socially relevant assignments/projects throughout the introductory computing sequence.