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Posters provide an opportunity for an informal presentation featuring “give and take” with conference attendees. Presenting a poster is a good way in which to discuss and receive feedback on work in progress that has not been fully developed into a paper. Posters should not be previously published, as a paper or a poster.

Any topic relevant to the conference focus areas is suitable for presentation as a poster. These include new results and insights around developing, implementing, or evaluating computing programs, curricula, and courses. However, the topic should lend itself to presentation in poster format with additional details available in a handout or web page. You might consider a poster presentation of teaching materials that you would like to share or preliminary research findings, such as:

  • imaginative assignments
  • innovative curriculum design
  • laboratory materials
  • effective ideas for recruiting and retaining students
  • pilot study completed
  • data collected, initial results
  • computing education research that is in a preliminary stage

Graduate or undergraduate students submitting posters may instead wish to submit to the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) held at the SIGCSE Technical Symposium. Like normal posters, ACM SRC posters are displayed at the conference, but the top poster authors also present their work orally, may win prizes and proceed to the international ACM Student Research Competition. Authors should submit to only one of the two tracks (posters or SRC), not to both. Any submissions made to more than one track will be desk rejected from both tracks.

Authors submitting work to SIGCSE TS 2025 are responsible for complying with all applicable conference authorship policies and those articulated by ACM. If you have questions about any of these policies, please contact program@sigcse2025.sigcse.org for clarification prior to submission.

ACM has made a commitment to collect ORCiD IDs from all published authors (https://authors.acm.org/author-resources/orcid-faqs). All authors on each submission must have an ORCiD ID (https://orcid.org/register) in order to complete the submission process. Please make sure to get your ORCID ID in advance of submitting your work.

Presentation Modality

One author of each accepted poster submission must present their work in-person at the conference. There will be no remote poster presentations.

Deadlines and Submission

Poster submissions consist of a 2-page extended abstract about the work including a 250-word short abstract, additional content about the work, and references. You will not submit the actual PDF of the poster itself for review.

Poster submissions to the SIGCSE TS 2025 must be made through EasyChair no later than Monday, 14 October 2024. The track chairs reserve the right to desk reject submissions that are incomplete after the deadline has passed.

Important Dates

Due Date Monday, 14 October 2024
Due Time 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12h)
Submission Limits 2 pages
Notification to Authors    Monday, 18 November 2024 tentative
Submission Link https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sigcsets2025
Session Duration 2 hours

Poster submissions can be up 2-pages long and must include: a 250-word short abstract, additional content about the work, and references.

Authors may find it useful to read the Instruction for Reviewers and the Review Form to understand how their submissions will be reviewed. Also note that when submitting, you will need to provide between 3-7 related topics from the Topics list under Info.

Abstracts

All poster submissions must have a plain-text abstract of up to 250 words. Abstracts should not contain subheadings or citations. The abstract should be submitted in EasyChair along with the submission metadata, and it should be included in the PDF version of the submission at the appropriate location.

Submission Templates

All poster submissions must be in English and formatted using the 2-column ACM SIG Conference Proceedings format and US letter size pages (8.5x11 inch or 215.9 x 279.4mm).

Here is a Sample Poster Submission, which is formatted using this template with optional line numbers. It also has some notes/tips and shows the required sections.

Page Limits: Poster submissions are limited to a maximum of 2 pages of content (including all titles, author information, abstract, main text, tables and illustrations, acknowledgements, supplemental material, and references).

MS Word Authors: Please use the interim Word template provided by ACM.

LaTeX Authors:

Requirements for Double Anonymous Review Process: At the time of submission all entries should include blank space for all anonymous author information (or anonymized author name, institution, and email address), followed by an abstract, body content, and references. For anonymized submissions, all blank space necessary for all author information should be reserved under the Title, or fully anonymized text can take its place (i.e. one block per author, with four lines for name, institution, address, and email; not more than three columns of blocks). In addition, please leave enough blank space for what you intend to include for Acknowledgements but do not include the text, especially names and granting agencies and grant numbers.

Other requirements: Include space for authors’ e-mail addresses on separate lines. Even if multiple authors have the same affiliation, grouping authors’ names or e-mail addresses, or providing an ‘e-mail alias’ is not acceptable, e.g., {anon1,anon2,anon3}@university.edu or firstname.lastname@college.org. NOTE: Poster submissions may omit the following sections from the standard ACM template: keywords, CCS Concepts. Update since 2024: Because Poster submissions are 2-pages long this year, they should include BOTH the ACM Copyright Block and the ACM Reference Format.

Desk rejects: Submissions that do not adhere to page limits or formatting requirements will be desk rejected without review.

Accessibility: SIGCSE TS 2025 authors are strongly encouraged to prepare submissions using these templates in such a manner that the content is widely accessible to potential reviewers, track chairs, and readers. Please see these resources for preparing an accessible submission.

Double Anonymized Review

Authors must submit ONLY an anonymized version of the submission. The goal of the anonymized version is to, as much as possible, provide the author(s) of the submission with an unbiased review. The anonymized version should have ALL mentions of the authors removed (including author’s names and affiliation plus identifying information within the body of the submission such as websites or related publications). However, authors are reminded to leave sufficient space in the submitted manuscripts to accommodate author information either at the beginning or end of the submission. LaTeX/Overleaf users are welcome to use the anonymous option, but are reminded that sufficient room must exist in the submission to include all author blocks when that option is removed. Authors may choose to use placeholder text in the author information block, but we encourage authors to use obviously anonymized placeholders like “Author 1”, “Affiliation 1”, etc.

Self-citations need not be removed if they are worded so that the reviewer doesn’t know if the writer is citing themselves. That is, instead of writing “We reported on our first experiment in 2017 in a previous paper [1]”, the writer might write “In 2017, an initial experiment was done in this area as reported in [1].

Submissions to the poster track are reviewed with the dual-anonymous review process. The reviewers are unaware of the author identities, and reviewers are anonymous to each other and to the authors.

The reviewing process includes a discussion phase after initial reviews have been posted. During this time, the reviewers can examine all reviews and privately discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the work in an anonymous manner through EasyChair. This discussion information can be used by the track chairs in addition to the content of the review in making final acceptance decisions.

The SIGCSE TS 2025 review process does not have a rebuttal period for authors to respond to comments, and all acceptance decisions are final.

ACM Policies

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects (https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/research-involving-human-participants-and-subjects). Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

ACM has made a commitment to collect ORCiD IDs from all published authors (https://authors.acm.org/author-resources/orcid-faqs). All authors on each submission must have an ORCiD ID (https://orcid.org/register) in order to complete the submission process. Please make sure to get your ORCID ID in advance of submitting your work.

Additional details are in the instructions for authors.

Getting ready

  • Make sure that all authors have obtained an ORCiD identifier. These identifiers are required for paper submission.
  • Check the author list carefully now and review with your co-authors. The authors on the submission must be the same as the authors on the final version of the work (assuming the work is accepted). Authors may not be added or removed after submission and must also appear in the same order as in the submission.
  • Identify at least one author who is willing to review for the symposium. Have that author or those authors sign up to review at https://tinyurl.com/review-sigcse25. (If they’ve done so already, there is no need to fill out the form a second time.) Researchers listed as co-authors on three or more submissions must volunteer to review. (Undergraduate co-authors are exempt from this requirement.)
  • Download an appropriate template. (see Instructions for Authors)
  • Review Additional Format Instructions in Instructions for Authors Tab- be sure you have included all required items.
  • Review the additional resources.
  • Review the instructions for reviewers and the Review Form to see what reviewers will be looking for in your paper.
  • Look at the list of topics in the Info menu on this site or on EasyChair and pick 3-7 appropriate topics for your submission.
  • Look at the EasyChair submission page to make sure you’ll be prepared to fill everything out. Note that you are permitted to update your submission until the deadline, so it is fine to put draft information there as you get ready.
  • IMPORTANT: no author names should be added to the PDF of your submission as the review process is double-anonymous.

The submission on EasyChair

Note: EasyChair does not let you save incomplete submission forms. Please fill out all of the fields in one sitting and save them. After that, you can continue to update the information in the fields and your submission until the deadline.

  • Use an appropriate template.
  • Ensure that your submission is accessible. See accessibility tips for authors for further details.
  • Ensure that your submission does not exceed the page limit.
  • For the double anonymous review process, ensure that your submission contains no author names or affiliations, but that you have left space for them, as per the instructions for authors.
  • The authors list in the EasyChair submission form should match exactly what you plan the non-anonymized author list to be in your camera-ready final submission (if the submission is accepted). Author lists can NOT be modified (this includes add/remove/reorder)
  • Submit the final version by 11:59 p.m. AOE, Monday, 14 October 2024.

What Gets Published?

The full 2-page extended abstract for each accepted poster will be published in the SIGCSE TS 2025 proceedings.

Presentation Details

By SIGCSE policy, at least one author of an accepted poster is required to register, attend, and present the work. SIGCSE TS 2025 posters will be presented only in-person.

Please print your poster in advance and bring it with you to the conference. The poster board size is 4 foot tall by 8 foot wide (48in x 96in), so a standard 36" by 48” poster would work well. Please arrive 15-20 minutes before your session to get set up. Each poster station will have push pins available. Please take down and remove your poster at the end of the session. At least one of the Poster Track Co-Chairs will be present at each session.

Suggestions for poster design are given in Creating Effective Academic Posters (UC Davis) and Research Posters 101 (ACM Crossroads article). While both of these references provide suggestions for student researchers, the ideas are also applicable to posters for this conference.

For samples of accepted posters, see prior SIGCSE TS proceedings. For example, posters for SIGCSE TS 2023 may be found at https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3545947#heading9 and a sample poster from that list can be found at https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3545947.3576292.

Sample Poster Submission

Here’s a Sample Poster Submission with Notes that is in the correct format and has additional notes about what is required.

Language Editing Assistance

ACM has partnered with International Science Editing (ISE) to provide language editing services to ACM authors. ISE offers a comprehensive range of services for authors including standard and premium English language editing, as well as illustration and translation services. Editing services are at author expense and do not guarantee publication of a manuscript.

Reviewing Phase Start Date End Date
Reviewing Thursday, 17 October 2024   Thursday, 31 October 2024
Discussion & Recommendations   Friday, 1 November 2024   Friday, 8 November 2024

Table of Contents

Overview

Posters provide an opportunity for an informal presentation featuring “give and take” with conference attendees. Presenting a poster is also a good way in which to discuss and receive feedback on work in progress that has not been fully developed into a paper. Posters should not be previously published (neither as a paper nor as a poster).

Poster submissions will be reviewed using the dual-anonymous review process (see below).

Submission and Review System

The review process for SIGCSE TS 2025 will be done using the EasyChair submission system (https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=sigcsets2025). Reviewers will be invited to join/login into EasyChair, update their profile, and select 3-5 topics that they are most qualified to review. To do so, reviewers select SIGCSE TS 2025 > Conference > My topics from the menu and select at most 5 topics. More topics make it harder for the EasyChair system to make a good set of matches. Reviewers also identify their Conflicts of Interest by selecting SIGCSE TS 2025 > Conference > My Conflicts.

Dual-Anonymous Review Process

Authors must submit ONLY an anonymized version of the submission. The goal of the anonymized version is to, as much as possible, provide the author(s) of the submission with an unbiased review. The anonymized version should have ALL mentions of the authors removed (including author’s names and affiliation plus identifying information within the body of the submission such as websites or related publications). However, authors are reminded to leave sufficient space in the submitted manuscripts to accommodate author information either at the beginning or end of the submission. LaTeX/Overleaf users are welcome to use the anonymous option, but are reminded that sufficient room must exist in the submission to include all author blocks when that option is removed. Authors may choose to use placeholder text in the author information block, but we encourage authors to use obviously anonymized placeholders like “Author 1”, “Affiliation 1”, etc.

Self-citations need not be removed if they are worded so that the reviewer doesn’t know if the writer is citing themselves. That is, instead of writing “We reported on our first experiment in 2017 in a previous paper [1]”, the writer might write “In 2017, an initial experiment was done in this area as reported in [1].

Submissions to the Posters track are reviewed with the dual-anonymous review process. The reviewers are unaware of the author identities, and reviewers are anonymous to each other and to the authors.

The reviewing process includes a discussion phase after initial reviews have been posted. During this time, the reviewers can examine all reviews and privately discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the work in an anonymous manner through EasyChair. An Associate Program Chair (APC) will help move the discussion forward. This discussion information can be used by the Track Chairs in addition to the content of the review in making final decisions.

The SIGCSE TS 2025 review process does not have a rebuttal period for authors to respond to comments, and all acceptance decisions are final.

Getting Started Reviewing

Before starting your review, you may be asked by the Track Chairs to declare conflicts with any submitting authors. Please do so in a timely manner so we can avoid conflicts during assignment.

As a Reviewer, we ask that you carefully read each submission assigned to you and write a constructive review that concisely summarizes what you believe the submission to be about. When reviewing a submission, consider:

  • the strengths and weaknesses,
  • the contribution to an outstanding SIGCSE TS 2025 program and experience for attendees, and
  • how it brings new ideas or extends current ideas through replication to the field and to practitioners and researchers of computing education.

Poster Review Guidelines

Keep in mind that posters are meant to be a place to present and receive feedback on work that is in progress. Please provide constructive feedback and clearly justify your choice of rating to help the authors. A review that gives a low score with no written comments is not helpful to the authors since it simply tells the authors that they have been unsuccessful, with no indication of how or why.

Reviewers will be asked to summarize the work; provide their familiarity with the submission topic; evaluate the contribution, background and relation work, approach and uniqueness, and results and conclusions; provide written comments including strengths and weaknesses of the submissions; and provide an overall evaluation.

We strongly recommend that you prepare your review in a separate document; EasyChair has been known to time out.

While your review text should clearly support your scores and recommendation, please do not include your preference for acceptance or rejection of a submission in the feedback to the authors. Instead, use the provided radio buttons to make a recommendation (the authors will not see this) based on your summary review and provide any details that refer to your recommendation directly in the confidential comments to the APC or Track Chairs. Remember that as a reviewer, you will only see a small portion of the submissions, so one that you recommend for acceptance may be rejected when considering the other reviewer recommendations and the full set of submissions.

Poster Review Process Steps

Step 1: Authors submit Posters

As indicated in the Instructions for Authors, submissions are supposed to be sufficiently anonymous so that the reviewer cannot determine the identity or affiliation of the authors. The main purpose of the anonymous reviewing process is to reduce the influence of potential (positive or negative) biases on reviewers’ assessments. You should be able to review the work without knowing the authors or their affiliations. Do not try to find out the identity of authors. When in doubt, please contact the Track Chairs.

Step 2: Reviewers and APCs Submit Topics and Conflicts

Reviewers and APCs select topics they feel most qualified to review. This helps the system prioritize posters for review assignment. Reviewers and APCs enter conflicts. Note that these steps MUST be completed for the Poster Track even if they were already completed for another track. The topics and conflicts do not propagate across tracks.

Step 3: Track Chairs Decide on Desk Rejects

The Track Chairs will quickly review each poster submission to determine whether it violates anonymization requirements, formatting requirements, or length restrictions. Authors of desk-rejected posters will be notified immediately. The Track Chairs may not catch every issue. If you see something during the review process that you believe should be desk rejected, contact the Track Chairs at posters@sigcse2025.sigcse.org before you write a review. The Track Chairs, in consultation with the Program Chairs, will make the final judgment about whether something is a violation, and give you guidance on whether and if so how to write a review. Note that Track Chairs with conflicts of interest are excluded from deciding on desk-rejected posters, leaving the decision to the other Track Chair.

Step 4: Track Chairs Assign Reviewers and APCs

The Track Chairs will collaboratively assign at least three Reviewers and one APC for each poster submission. The Track Chairs will be advised by the submission system assignment algorithm. Reviewing assignments can only be made by a Track Chair without a conflict of interest.

Step 5a: Reviewers Review Posters

Assigned Reviewers submit their anonymous reviews by the review deadline, reviewing each of their assigned submissions against the Poster Reviewing Guidelines. We strongly recommend that you prepare your rationale in a separate document; EasyChair has been known to time out. Note that Reviewers must NOT include accept or reject decisions in their review text. (They will indicate accept/reject recommendations separately.)

Due to the internal and external (publication) deadlines, we generally cannot give reviewers or APCs extensions. Note that reviewers, APCs, and Track Chairs with conflicts cannot see any of the reviews of the posters for which they have conflicts of interest during this process.

Step 5b: APCs and Track Chairs Monitor Review Progress

APCs and Track Chairs periodically check in to ensure that progress is being made. If needed, Track Chairs send email reminders to the reviewers with the expectations and timelines. If needed, the Program Chairs and Track Chairs recruit emergency reviewers if any of the submissions do not have a sufficient number of reviews, if there is lots of variability in the reviews, or if an expert review is needed.

Step 6: Discussion between Reviewers and APCs

The discussion period provides the opportunity for the Reviewers and the APCs to discuss the reviews and reach an agreement on the quality of the submission relative to the expectations for the track to which it was submitted. The APCs are expected to take a leadership role and moderate the discussion. Reviewers are expected to engage in the discussion when prompted by other Reviewers and/or by the APCs by using the Comments feature of EasyChair.

During the discussion period, Reviewers are able to revise their reviews but are NOT required to do so. It is important that at no point Reviewers feel forced to change their reviews, scores, or viewpoints in this process. The APC can disagree with the reviewers and communicate this to the Track Chairs if needed. Everyone is asked to do the following:

  • Read all the reviews of all posters assigned (and re-read your own reviews).
  • Engage in a discussion about sources of disagreement.
  • Use the Poster Reviewing Guidelines to guide your discussions.
  • Be polite, friendly, and constructive at all times.
  • Be responsive and react as soon as new information comes in.
  • Remain open to other reviewers shifting your judgments.
  • Explicitly state any clarifying questions that could change your evaluation of the poster

Step 7: Track Chairs & Program Chairs Make Decisions & Notify Authors

The Track Chairs go through all the submissions and read all the reviews to ensure clarity and as much consistency with the review process and its criteria as possible. APCs are consulted if needed. Poster submissions do not receive meta-reviews in general, but in a small number of cases Track Chairs may write brief meta-reviews to share their interpretation of reviews. The Track Chairs make recommendations to the Program Chairs based on the reviews and their own expertise as well as a desire to provide an appropriately varied program. The Program Chairs then make final decisions and notify all authors of the decisions about their posters via the submission system.

Step 8: Evaluation

The Evaluation Chairs send out surveys to authors, reviewers, and APCs. Please take the time to respond to these surveys, as they inform processes and policies for future SIGCSE Technical Symposia. The Track Chairs also request feedback from the APCs on the quality of reviews as a metric to be used for future invitations to review for the SIGCSE Technical Symposium.

Discussion

The discussion and recommendation period provides the opportunity for the Track Chairs to discuss reviews and feedback so they can provide the best recommendation for acceptance or rejection to the Program Chairs and that the submission is given full consideration in the review process. We ask that Reviewers engage in discussion when prompted by other reviewers, the APC, or the Track Chairs by using the Comments feature of EasyChair. During this period you will be able to revise your review based on the discussion, but you are not required to do so.

The Track Chairs will make a final recommendation to the Program Chairs from your feedback.

Recalcitrant Reviewers

Reviewers who don’t submit reviews, have reviews with limited constructive feedback, do not engage effectively in the discussion phase, or submit inappropriate reviews will be removed from the reviewer list (as per SIGCSE policy). Recalcitrant reviewers will be informed of their removal from the reviewer list. Reviewers with repeated offenses (two within a three-year period) will be removed from SIGCSE reviewing for three years.

The following text represents the review form.

Summary: Please provide a brief summary of the submission, its audience, and its main point(s).

Familiarity: Rate your personal familiarity with the topic area of this submission in relation to your research or practical experience.

The contribution is clearly described: Select your rating.

Background and Related Work: Please rate the background and related work of this poster submission.

Approach and Uniqueness: Please rate the approach and uniqueness of this poster submission.

Results and Contribution: Please rate the results and contribution of this poster submission.

Overall evaluation: Please provide a detailed justification that includes constructive feedback that summarizes the strengths & weaknesses of the submission and clarifies your scores. Both the score and the review text are required, but remember that the authors will not see the overall recommendation score (only your review text). You should NOT directly include your preference for acceptance or rejection in your review.