Best Paper Recognition at AICSEPAR 2026

March 17, 2026

At the inaugural GenAI in CS Education Workshop: Practice and Research (AICSEPAR) in San Diego, two of Stephen MacNeil’s co-authored papers were selected among the top computing education papers of 2025. The workshop highlighted top recent work across the computing education community, including papers from venues such as CompEd, SIGCSE, ICER, and ITiCSE.

The recognized papers were:

Most excitingly, Probing the Unknown was selected as the overall best paper of 2025 across the set of computing education conferences considered by the workshop. The recognition reflects both the strength of the work itself and the growing visibility of research on generative AI, programming pedagogy, and computing education coming from this broader collaboration network.

The San Diego event brought together researchers and educators thinking seriously about how generative AI is reshaping computer science education. It was especially meaningful to see two papers from this body of work recognized on that stage, and to have one of them receive the workshop’s top overall paper distinction.

From the workshop

Researchers and educators gathered together during the AICSEPAR workshop in San Diego.
Participants gathering during the AICSEPAR workshop in San Diego.
Paul Denny presenting the award-winning paper during the AICSEPAR workshop.
Paul Denny presenting the overall best paper recognition.
Stephen MacNeil in conversation during the AICSEPAR workshop.
Stephen MacNeil in discussion at the workshop.