As undergraduates studying computer science progress through the curriculum, one additional kind of academic CS experience that many undertake, often outside of formal course structures, is their first CS research project. As anyone who has conducted CS research before will know, there are many components of working on research that don’t necessarily come up in traditional classes. How do we as educators and research mentors teach them these skills?

In this BoF, we invite anyone with experience or observations from teaching undergraduate-level students (broadly including advanced upper secondary students and very early graduate students as well) to do research, in either formalized programs/courses or unformalized settings, to come together and discuss this topic with others interested. What approaches have you tried to this kind of teaching that have worked? What are challenges that you haven’t yet found a good solution to? How do we go about evaluating what works and what doesn’t, when we’re typically trying out teaching approaches with much lower numbers of students than we would typically have in a class? Through discussion, we will begin to lay out some best practices for undergraduates’ educators and mentors in the research domain, and outline key challenges that remain.