The University of California-Santa Barbara proposes to create a program that integrates computing education with topics -- Mesoamerican culture and conservation of endangered species -- that are culturally relevant and attractive to Latina/os and females and their families. The focus is not on ecology or cultural studies as an end, but rather as a means to interest students in computing. The themes will motivate students from the targeted groups to excel in school, attend college, and choose computing as a career. The goal is to attract new students, students who are not already interested in computing. The program will include a summer program, in conjunction with long-term mentoring, advising, and tracking. Over the course of the 4 week summer program, students will learn about culture, history, and conservation as motivators for the real goal: learning about computer science. Participants will then use programming and web technology to create and share art, stories, and games with their peers and their parents through the eVoices web site. A comprehensive follow-up plan will engage and retains students from middle school through university with hierarchical mentoring and support from existing university programs (Pathways). The approach, if successful, can be replicated at many institutions using different culturally-relevant topics that appeal to their target populations.
The goal of our summer camp was to investigate the effectiveness of using culturally-relevant themes to increase diversity in computer science. This was divided into two categories. First, does advertising culturally-relevant themes ttract students to an interdisciplinary camp? Second, do those students, who were not necessarily interested in computer science when they arrived, end up interested in computer science? Our finding was that culturally-relevant themes for attracting underrepresented groups was very useful for some themes but not others. In particular, we found that themes chosen based on cultural gender norms were more successful than ethnic culture. We chose two themes - animal conservation and Mayan culture. We found that females were much more likely to have been interested in the animal themes than the males, as expected. We were surprised, though, that the ethnicity of the student was not very correlated to the interest in Mayan culture. The end result was that over 90% of our participants were part of our target groups - females and/or Latinos. Second, we found that exposure to computer science through this engaging, interdisciplinary camp increased interest in computer science by both groups - those who were already interested and those who were not. In fact, by the end of the camp, the two groups had very similar interest in computer science. Finally, we developed automated analysis that, when combined with students, allowed for much more efficient and accurate assessment of the student projects. This showed us that students understood some concepts very well - how to make a set of instructions that control animals that are all in order and how to make the items respond to mouse clicks or pressing keys on the keyboard. Students did well learning how to coordinate the timing between multiple pictures in the story. Students struggled with harder concepts like how to make a complex animation of an animal flying across the screen. The broader impacts of this project are huge. We have a blueprint for one successful way to engage students not already interested in computer science to participate and learn computer science concepts. Students who have traditionally shied away from computing became interested. This will open up many STEM careers for these students, giving them confidence to become future innovators. If a curriculum using these principles were to be introduced into public schools, students across the United States could get exposed to computer science, transforming their lives and leading to better competitiveness for our workforce.
