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In case you hadn’t noticed, many more men than women work in tech. According to the National Center For Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), women accounted for 26 percent of the computing workforce in 2013. Three percent of those women were African-American. Five percent were Asian. Just two percent were Hispanic.
The good news: two University of Colorado Boulder programs trying to reverse those trends just received a little more firepower.
Scalable Game Design, a program based in CU-Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, and AspireIT, a program of the NCWIT based in CU-Boulder’s Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society Institute (ATLAS), each were recently given RISE awards, funds from Google intended to aid students in accessing computer science education. The programs were awarded $100,000 and $150,000, respectively. The rewards will be used to fund and further push the programs toward their goal, which is ultimately this:
“We want more girls and women as the technical design people producing technology, as opposed to just using it,” said Adriane Bradberry, NCWIT’s communication director.
Education is the start of it all
Those troubling workforce statistics make sense when one considers numbers pertaining to computer science education.
Girls accounted for 56 percent of Advanced Placement (AP) test-takers in 2013, according to the NCWIT. However, only 19 percent of AP computer science test-takers were girls.
Unsurprisingly, Scalable Game Design and AspireIT focus on education.
“Our goal is to reinvent computer science education and bring it back into middle schools, elementary school and also increase the number of kids that are exposed to computer science in high schools,” said Yasko Endo, project manager of Scalable Game Design, which has educated more than 10,000 American students in basic game design and computing concepts.
Endo said the program, which trains licensed teachers to implement game design and computing science into their scheduled lesson plans, has been working with educators for 20 years, though the research element has been active for nearly the last eight years. In the summer, they train teachers — many from Colorado — in the basics of programming, as well as in alternative methods of teaching. Endo said research shows computer science students — especially girls — respond better to guided discovery and inquiry, rather than the traditional mode of direct instruction.
“You can throw tutorials [at kids], and say, ‘try this,’ and ‘try that,’ but if the kids are not having fun to begin with, if they don’t have an enjoyable experience, then the motivation doesn’t develop and the interest doesn’t go up,” Endo said.
Scalable Game Design is funded by two grants from the National Science Foundation. With the Google RISE award, Endo said Scalable Game Design will work with the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey, a move that marks the first RISE program to work in Mexico. Through that strategic partnership, 3,500 students in Nuevo Leon, Mexico will have access to the program.
Endo said the money will also be used to create materials in Spanish, which will be of great use to Colorado’s Spanish-speaking population.
A win-win for everyone
While Scalable Game Design works within a teacher’s designated lesson plan — thus exposing the material to the whole class — AspireIT takes an alternative approach to educating girls in computer science.
AspireIT functions with a near-peer model, allowing high school girls and college women to volunteer to lead middle school girls in informal IT workshops outside of school. Those program leaders are backed by NCWIT and, since 2013, they have led 70 programs in 23 states, reaching about 2,000 girls and providing nearly 115,000 hours of computing education.
Bradberry said the money from the RISE award will allow NCWIT to ensure those programs are properly funded. In addition, she said this method is a win-win for everyone, leaving the younger generations educated and allowing the high school girls and college women to become leaders.
By ensuring the individual programs are fully operational, Bradberry said AspireIT can inch closer to its near-future goal: by 2018, engage more than 10,000 girls in computer science education.
In order to make a real impact pertaining to the number of women in computing, one that affects everyone, Endo and Bradberry know there can be no shortage of programs like the ones they represent.
“We’re making sure that other people can see what we do, so they can replicate it,” Endo said, adding that the near-peer models could work with other STEM subjects. “It’s a whole other ball game when a child can say, ‘I created this.’ It teaches them what they can do, and that’s really critical.”
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