It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (“Let Me Help You with That” edition) Dan Garcia (co-Moderator) UC Berkeley Berkeley, CA, USA ddgarcia@berkeley.edu Jim Huggins (co-Moderator) Keering University Flint, MI, USA jhuggins@kettering.edu Lauren Bricker University of Washington Seale, WA, USA bricker@cs.washington.edu Adam Gaweda North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC, USA agaweda@ncsu.edu David J. Malan Harvard University Cambridge, MA, USA malan@harvard.edu Joël Porquet-Lupine UC Davis Davis, CA, USA jporquet@ucdavis.edu Kristin Stephens-Martinez Duke University Durham, NC, USA ksm@cs.duke.edu ABSTRACT Conference presentations usually focus on successful innovations: new ideas that yield significant improvements to current practice. Yet we oſten learn more from failure than from success. In this panel, we present five case studies of “good ideas” for improving CS education that didn’t go as planned, related to offering additional help to students. Each contributor will describe their “good idea,” the situation that resulted, and wider lessons for the CS community. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Computer science educa- tion. KEYWORDS Experience report; learning from failure; comp.risks ACM Reference Format: Dan Garcia (co-Moderator), Jim Huggins (co-Moderator), Lauren Bricker, Adam Gaweda, David J. Malan, Joël Porquet-Lupine, and Kristin Stephens- Martinez. 2023. It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (“Let Me Help You with at” edition). In Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2 (SIGCSE 2023), March 15–18, 2023, Toronto, ON, Canada. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/ 3545947.3569599 1 SUMMARY Most educators (not just in CS) are genuinely interested in the success of their students. To be sure, we seek the advancement of our discipline by producing well-trained practitioners. But we also seek Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). SIGCSE 2023, March 15–18, 2023, Toronto, ON, Canada © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9433-8/23/03. https://doi.org/10.1145/3545947.3569599 the good of our students themselves, helping them to achieve their goals in their chosen fields of study. One natural manifestation of this interest can be seen in offers of help to students who might seem to need it, such as flexible deadlines, increased personal aention, or additional resources for practice. Unfortunately, offering more help sometimes results in decreased student performance. In this panel, we offer an opportunity to “celebrate failure,” by presenting five case studies of computing education initiatives that “seemed like a good idea at the time,” but ended up not going as planned. ese “good ideas” are related to the theme of providing additional help to students who seem to need it. e presenters will discuss their “good ideas,” the disappointing results, and (most importantly) the lessons learned! Our goal is to foster a supportive community where failure is celebrated rather than criticized. We hope to laugh and learn together from these experience reports. is session is modeled aſter several similar standing-room-only sessions offered at recent SIGCSE symposia. 2 PANEL STRUCTURE We will open with five minutes to describe this unique format, and its history. Each panelist will have eight minutes to share their expe- riences. Following the presentations, the moderators will facilitate audience questions for the remaining thirty minutes. We prefer a performance-driven in-person session, but recognize we will have to be flexible, and will play pre-recorded videos for panelists who need to be remote. With co-moderators, one will field questions in-person, the other will manage online participants. 3 LAUREN BRICKER We were inspired to incorporate a generous resubmission policy in an upper division course halfway through our Winter 2022 quarter to support students who were struggling with the remote/hybrid start due to a resurgence of COVID-19. Initially this was well re- garded; students who were having difficulty keeping up with course work (beyond our late day policy) no longer needed to ask for exten- sions due to extenuating circumstances. We continued this policy 1204