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When President Obama unveiled his plan to give all students in America the opportunity to learn computer science [1], discussions about Computational Thinking (CT) began in earnest in many organizations across a wide range of disciplines. However, Jeannette Wing stated the importance of CT for everyone a decade earlier in her landmark essay [2]. Since then, several people and organizations have posted their own definition of CT, which presents a challenge in being able to assess CT understanding and awareness in people. In an effort to build consensus on how to best assess CT, the authors have developed a web-based tool that will enable CT experts globally to populate, review and rate questions that address various attributes of CT. TECHFIT (Teaching Engineering Concepts to Harness Future Innovators and Technologists) is an NSF-funded project that is examining the impact of their program's educational intervention based on the participants' delivery context. The CT tool was designed and developed as a functional, web-based tool that supports management of the CT questions database and gives different levels of access to various stakeholders, including the TECHFIT project team and academicians all over the world. The CT tool includes features to enable authorized users to review, insert, and update a variety of questions in different formats. The level of access to this system is determined by the roles/ permissions granted by the administrator. It also enables users to have the ability to rate the questions. The ratings are then aggregated to yield an overall rating value. Attendees of the paper presentation will be invited to sign up and explore this tool to provide feedback for improvement of the tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increase in popularity of operating systems like macOS and Chrome OS, creating non-mobile applications that run cross-platform is becoming a challenge for developers all over the world [1]. It is costly to create non-Windows versions of applications since the Operating Systems (OS) differ in architecture and implementation. Many creators from various organizations choose different routes for increasing application compatibility but are not always willing to pay the overhead of developing the same application on another platform. As a result, consumers are stuck with not being able to use the software they need and end up resorting to workarounds ranging from running virtual machines to parallel booting the operating system. Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIXcompliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD free of cost [2]. It is an excellent way to run Windows applications on macOS and other Linux machines without installing a resource intensive virtual machine or restarting the machine to dual boot. Wine has been in active use since 1993. Since then, it has been adopted by many large companies and integrated into their products, including Borland, Google, IBM and Oracle [3]. This paper describes how a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project experienced a need to be able to run a Windows-only program on Macs or Chromebooks and explains how Wine may be used to overcome a similar OS-limiting challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is an annual, international meeting designed to provide support and inspiration to women to pursue and stay in computing careers. This week-long conference provides attendees with access to many technical and non-technical presentations, nightly fun activities, many mentoring opportunities, and a plethora of industry recruiters hoping to hire talented female students and professionals. Unfortunately, the cost and length of time of the event is prohibitive for many students. Fortunately, there are many smaller versions of the celebration events at the regional level. The Indiana Celebration of Women in Computing (InWIC) began in 2004 as a way of offering the Grace Hopper Conference experience without impeding on students' desire to attend classes and reducing costs to make it affordable to larger groups of students. In the past, the venue for this event, which occurred every two years, was an inn at a state park, which provided a quiet and relaxing setting for networking, mentoring, learning, presenting, and having fun. Beginning with 2015, this regional conference will become an annual event in a more central location that is closer to an international airport to be more accessible to more students in the region as well as be more conveniently located for industry sponsors who recruit at the event. This paper and presentation will share the event's general program as well as participant feedback collected at the 2014 InWIC meeting, which demonstrate that the event has been successful in reinforcing the decision of pursuing a computing career path by young female computing students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finding ways to generate interest in Engineering Technology (ET) is an ongoing challenge for many colleges and universities. Starting early is always recommended; however, employing recruitment initiatives even in high school may yield success when the right motivators are used. Having strong corporate partnerships not only enables delivery of specialized programs but also strengthens the message from both an academic and industry perspective. The authors partnered with an international manufacturing company that offered a national competition to high school students as part of their STEM outreach. Although the event was labeled as being national, the vast majority of teams were located near the company's headquarters. The recruitment begins in October and the final contest is in mid-February. There are several checkpoints along the way which determine whether a team has accomplished enough to stay in the contest. This paper describes one high school competition that began as a "national competition" at a single location in 2009 and has evolved over the past three years to a competition that now includes three regional contests where national qualifiers are selected to compete nationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attracting any group to a particular discipline requires providing opportunities for that group to participate as well as making the experience engaging enough that the participants are eager to learn more. TECHFIT (Teaching Engineering Concepts to Harness Future Innovators and Technologists) is a three-year project designed to spark interest in engineering technology in middle school students, especially minority students. TECHFIT teaches participants about electricity, wiring, safety, programming, and fitness. Each participant team creates their own functional, prototype exergame using a provided technology toolkit. The primary goal of this intervention is to increase student interest in pursuing science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) study, but a related secondary goal is to encourage a healthy lifestyle related to physical activity. This paper will share the design of the TECHFIT program and provide recommendations regarding the approach used to attract all groups, including minorities, to engineering technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]