Contrasting Women’s Experience in CS at Different Institutions Mark Guzdial College of Computing/GVU Georgia Tech Our Goal: Ubiquitous Computing Education  Computing as part of a liberal education (Alan Perlis)  Strategy: Relevance, opportunities for creativity, social context Pick a good context, and the rest comes for free.

CS1315 Introduction to Media Computation Overall, CS1315 has been 51% female  About 300 students/term  Required in Architecture, Management, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, and Biology Focus: Learning programming and CS concepts within the context of media manipulation and creation  Converting images to grayscale and negatives, splicing and reversing sounds, writing programs to generate HTML, creating movies out of Web-accessed content.  Computing for communications, not calculation

Positive Results Success rates (earned A, B, or C) rose from 71.2% to around 90% “I just wish I had more time to play around with that and make neat effects. But JES [course development environment] will be on my computer forever, so… that’s the nice thing about this class is that you could go as deep into the homework as you wanted. So, I’d turn it in and then me and my roommate would do more after to see what we could do with it.” But let’s move on… A single class doesn’t change enough.

Results: Follow-on Survey In Spring 2004, contacted all 2003 CS1315 students. 19% had written a Python program on their own since the class had ended. 27% had edited media that they hadn’t previously. “Definitely makes me think of what is going on behind the scenes of such programs like Photoshop and Illustrator.” “I feel more comfortable around computers and like I could learn and understand other computer programming languages more easily.”

Creating new options: An alternative path into Computing Created a CS minor. Allow CS majors to take our introductory computing media computation sequence. Created a new BS in Computational Media.  Joint between College of Computing and School of Literature, Culture, and Communications  ½ CS, and ½ drama theory, performance art, film studies, etc.  ~40 students in first semester, 30% female

A Multimedia CS2 in Java Follow-on course started Spring 2005: Representing Structure and Behavior. Teaching linked lists, trees, stacks, and queues in a media context.  Modeling, scene graphs, linked lists of music elements, etc. 75% female

First posting to CS1316 CoWeb (Female architecture major) I'm really excited to be in the class, although it's kinda funny since I don't have to take it. Programming is fun, and if that makes me weird, then I'm weird.