We are committed in our efforts to increase exposure of young, underrepresented students to engineering and engineers. Beyond talks and other rather traditional activities, which are important but insufficient, we are ramping up a series of single-day coding workshops for under-represented students from NYC. Below is a list of outreach activities, after which we describe our major outreach activity: coding workshops for under-represented students.
We are developing a series of hands-on, coding workshops aimed at increasing exposure of under-represented students to engineering and CS. We're currently focusing our efforts on NYC under-represented high-school students. We believe that the current severe gender and race imbalance in Computer Science is partly caused by limited exposure to coding and CS in general in many of US schools. Our workshops are single-day events in which we try to expose students as much as possible to engineering and engineers.
One example of such a workshop, which we have organized in the past, is an app coding workshop we developed as part of the Engineering Exploration Outreach program organized by the Society of Women Engineers. We organized this workshop for the first time in 2014 and are now going to organize a second one in March 2015. Our goal was to illustrate to the students that computer science is an fun field, where cool people -- men and women -- can contribute. In 2014, we started by showing the students Github, as well as faces of real, cool people -- both women and men -- that contribute to highly worthy projects. Then, we showed them code for some simplified versions of a couple of Web applications that they interact with daily. Finally, we showed them how to build their own little Web application, a very visual screen-drawing Javascript application that created very interesting ribbon forms using some interesting geometry formulas. While we have no measure of effectiveness to date, we have seen a few unique IPs coming repeatedly to our workshop's website for about a week to develop further on the ribbon app.
In the future, we plan to develop the workshop's materials further and create some ways to more reliably measure effectiveness or engagement of our workshop. We also hope to increase the frequency of our workshops (e.g., perhaps one per quarter). We're planning to release our workshop materials opensource so that others in the future can apply them to organize such outreach activities.
Finally, we're now looking for opportunities to extend our workshop's scope to other students from under-represented groups, such as students from under-priviledged communities. If you're teaching at a school with a significant student population from under-represented groups, please contact us (roxana at cs dot columbia dot edu). We'd be happy and honored to bring our CS exposure workshops to schools in under-priviledged communities of NYC.