This week my kids are attending Engineering Science Quest, a super-successful, week-long summer camp program at the University of Waterloo. They’ve been to ESQ before, but this year they’re attending the Tesla technology camp, exposing them to Computer Science rather than the physical sciences as in previous years.
The UW undergraduate students who lead the campers are doing a terrific job in making it interesting. What the Tesla camp is not about is programming. Rather, it’s about using computing to do interesting things. Composing and editing synthetic music. Directing, shooting and editing a music video. Manipulating digital photographs with iPhoto and PhotoShop. And, for some hands-on experience, soldering integrated-circuit boards to construct something (I know not what).
With the fun they’re having, it’s no wonder they’re finding computing interesting (Doh!). Moreover, it is encouraging that so many of the participants are girls, particularly given the University of Waterloo’s current female undergraduate enrollment in Computer Science.
Coincidentally, this afternoon my colleague Steve Olson in Concord, NH shared with me two articles on how other institutions are making Computer Science interesting, particularly for girls. Bringing Girls Into the Science-Major Pipeline, an article published in The Chronicle for Higher Education, describes transforming a marketing approach to attract young people to Computer Science by, simply, surveying the intended audience:
As long as teenagers believe that computer science is boring, difficult, and antisocial, they won’t choose it as a career. But existing stereotypes can be challenged by changing the emphasis—by introducing computer professionals as the lively, interesting people that most of them are, by demonstrating that computer science is an exciting field that has a major impact on just about every aspect of human life, and by communicating all of that to young people using language and images that resonate with them.
The second article is Girls, their families and friends, Gather for Computer Science, which describes an initiative by Pacific University (Oregon) to introduce Computer Science to girls in Grade 7 and 8.
Both articles are a great read. My thanks to Steve for sending them my way.
Glenn Paulley is a Director of Engineering at Sybase iAnywhere.
