Recruitment Practices to Engage Female Interest In Computing
From Anita Borg Institute Wiki
Contents |
Presenter
Dawn Laux and Alka Harriger
Abstract
Identify the best way to recruit women into the discipline of computing is on ongoing challenges.
Target audience: Anyone interested in developing and/or using tested high school and middle school outreach program
Session Notes
Purdue computer IT Department Engagement:
Program variety:
- Meeting the needs of the participants
- Session length
- Location
- Personnel selection
Why facilitate these programs?
- Bring awareness to the possibilities of a career
- Tap a student’s interest about computing
- Erase misconceptions about computing
- Develop a mentoring opportunity for future students
Purdue Computer and IT Department program engagement:
High school program:
- SPIRIT - DOiT - VISION - WOWiT
Middle school program:
- TAGS - TOTAL - TEAM
Pre-college program - ABC
Logistics for improved enrollment and quality programming
- Instructional Technology needs
- Facilities
Instructional technology needs:
- Internet
- Hardware and software availability
- Computer login accounts
- Setup time before each session
Why?
- Know the audience age of participants
- Layout of room may have obstructions
How?
– Review the level of difficulty and predetermine the ratio
- Handouts available in advance if the room poses an issue
Personnel
- Finding volunteers
- Co-ordination
- Confidence in subject matter
- Ability to respond to the problems
- Lesson plan of computing
Why?
– Careful consideration should be placed when selecting qualified instructors
- Lesson plans are essential
Feedback:
- Follow-up with participant’s feedback
- Data analysis
- Action
Activity Development:
Impact of IT:
- Music, fashion, education
- Movies, gaming, healthcare
- Sports, fitness
- Robotics, construction enforcement
- Disaster relief, cooking, Automobiles/Racing
The activity needs to be pull out IT with real-time examples
Activity: User requirements in software development
Impact: Design thinking
Tools: unplugged activity
Link to original project from the Stanford d school https://dschool.standford.edu/dgift
Time allotted for activity: 60-90 minutes
Team work: develop a software app prototype based on the end users point of view
- Be able to ask deep Take-away: probing questions to define the problem from human perspective
- Experience how ethnographic technique provide empathy and how this relates to design
- Provide examples of effective ideas of potential problem solutions
Examples of other activities:
- Create your own social network
- Getting fit with technology
- Creating a animation with scratch to promote an event
- Analyze needs for a future cell phone
- Develop a website using visual web express
- Investigating a crime scene to capture digital evidence
Activities are meant to spend interest, be fun and display social impact.
Q&A:
1. Do you have any program for other groups to transfer students other than ABC ? No, due to expensiveness.
2. What convinced to volunteer as a speaker? More frequent request seems to be a resistant, if yearly once or twice request comes then it is a pleasurable job to volunteering as a speaker.
