Changing CS1 doesn’t help recruitment
March 2, 2011 at 9:28 am 9 comments
Our experience at Georgia Tech matches the one at Brown. Changing CS1 can help keep the women who come in, but doesn’t draw new women in. Students get turned off to CS before they get to college, and improving CS1 can help with retention and attrition, but not recruitment from high school.
Those already on campus might be a different story. Barb had a great idea that she told me about yesterday — we should offer more Biology-inspired CS1-level courses like the great one at Harvey Mudd. Biology has way too many students for available jobs, and it’s female-majority. Let’s provide all those Biology students (who won’t get jobs in Biology) a better option.
The CS department also offers three introductory sequences, partially in hopes of attracting women. But offering many options likely has not affected the University’s numbers, Doeppner said. He said he doubts introductory courses “are scaring women off any more than they’re scaring men off.”
“The problem is not that women get disenchanted with CS when they get here — it’s that they aren’t coming here interested in computer science,” he said. “The perspective that people are getting is that a bunch of male hackers get together and just code all the time, which isn’t really computer science.”
via Algorithms can’t solve CS gender gap – The Brown Daily Herald.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: BPC, CS1, high school CS, NCWIT, undergraduate enrollment.
1.
gasstationwithoutpumps | March 2, 2011 at 10:29 am
The link https://www.cs.hmc.edu/twiki/bin/view/CS6
seems to be a better pointer to the intro bio/cs at Harvey Mudd.
2.
Alfred Thompson | March 2, 2011 at 4:28 pm
When I was teaching HS I had a couple of female students who took a first programming course but didn’t take more advanced CS courses while still in HS but who later went on to major in CS in college. I like to think that thier HS experience helped in that they knew what CS was and were not turned off by the subject itself. I fear that they may have, in some cases, been turned off by the macho environment that I tried to counter without as much success as I would have liked in HS. But also in HS there were more other electives that filled their schedules.
My feeling is that a good intro CS course in HS is a success not just if it adds to enrollment in advanced HS courses but avoids keeping people from taking more CS in college. If it encourages more CS in college that is of course a bigger win. But clearly if we want to build the pipeline we have to start earlier than college. Even high school is getting to be late.
3.
Christine Alvarado | March 4, 2011 at 12:13 am
Intriguing post. The interesting thing about Harvey Mudd is that, as great a course as CS6 is, the upswing in our women majors happened well before its introduction and in fact coincided with the modification to CS5 (our “normal” CS1 course). Of course, this also coincided with a number of other changes we made at the same time, which are described in our SIGCSE paper from last year: http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~alvarado/papers/fp068-alvarado.pdf
I realize Harvey Mudd is a little different from a lot of other schools in some important ways, but I still think that changing CS1 can at least in part bring new majors, but maybe not by itself? But I’m also in complete agreement that things need to change earlier in the pipeline too.
Anyway, all the changes an outcomes over the last several years are all so complicated and fascinating to try to make sense of!
4.
Mark Guzdial | March 4, 2011 at 8:02 am
Hi Christine! I’m not arguing that Harvey Mudd’s upswing is due to your Bio course — I think that all your other efforts (like the trip to Grace Hopper) is having a major impact. I’m exploring the idea that we in CS more broadly (not just at HMC) might draw more women in from biology, using classes like your BioCS course.
5.
Emil Biga | March 4, 2011 at 6:35 pm
I’m interested in what the readers of this blog think of
Associate Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi of Brown last
paragraphs of the Brown article.
“Broadening focus”
“While Krishnamurthi said he supports the University’s departmental efforts,
he takes a wider view of the situation. “I don’t understand why women
should be more important than say, African Americans or Hispanics
or the poor,” he said. “I don’t want to be picking and choosing and
saying, ‘That’s the most important criterion.’ For me, they’re all students.” ”
“Krishnamurthi, who taught an introductory CS course last fall, said he
believes the larger problem is a misunderstanding of what computer
science is. He said the problem is largely fueled by high school programs.
The Advanced Placement computer science curriculum taught in many
high schools has “tons of contradictions” in its design, he said.
Many universities, including Brown, do not offer credit for AP
computer science. Krishnamurthi said this should be an indication
that additional reform is needed.”
“To combat the problem, Krishnamurthi has spent the past 15 years
running two outreach programs to introduce high school and middle
school students to computer science. While he does hope to
alleviate misconceptions about computer science, Krishnamurthi says
his goal is broader and that ultimately, he hopes to improve
students’ math skills and encourage them to get into science,
echnology, engineering and mathematics.”
I think the following link explains some of his thoughts:
The textbook
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/
In general:
http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fk-why-cs-doesnt-matter/paper.pdf
Thanks
6.
Alfred Thompson | March 4, 2011 at 6:45 pm
I agree that they are all students. I also agree that we need more outreach to under represented minorities and the poor. In fact I do a lot of career talks and other outreach events to all of those groups. There is a big “women’s lobby” though that does have getting more girls into CS as their main focus and I don’t have a problem with that. There are also black and Hispanic engeneering groups who have attracting more of those groups as well. It’s a big tent and we have room for all of them because one size does not fit all in terms of recruitment. I do think that boys of color have more incommon with other boys in many ways than they do with girls to paint with broad strokes. And many of the things we do to attract girls also work to attract more boys who are not attracted the same way as the boys we are attracting.
7.
Bonnie MacKellar | March 5, 2011 at 9:11 am
Our program is relatively successful at attracting minorities and the poor. Our CS majors are evenly split into 4 groups : white, hispanic, African-American, and Asian-American. No one group dominates in terms of numbers. Most of our students are “first in their family to attend college”. However, our majors are only about 10% female. I think the problem of attracting and retaining women is fundamentally different. With our current majors, the big problems are lack of preparation and severe lack of study skills. That is not surprising, given that many are products of poor K12 schools. Their focus is overwhelmingly career-oriented, and the first question they ask about a program is “Will this get me a job as soon as I finish?”. Many of them do not perceive computer science as an academic discipline, but rather, a career-preparation program, so they can become a network technician, or IT specialist when they finish.
Young women, on the other hand, tend to have stronger study skills and overall (not-CS) preparation. You can find many studies on the differences between young men and young women as they come to college that bear this out. The problem is, computer science as they view it (and unfortunately, they are somewhat right) is just not an attractive field. They see it as a difficult field to combine with having a family – and having worked in industry myself, I tend to agree. They look at all the networking and gaming geeks in our program, and they see a social milieu that they don’t care for. And then they look over at our chemistry, biology, and pharmacy programs, and they see lots of women, a “nicer” environment, and a culture that isn’t all about gaming. We can’t compete, particularly, with our pharmacy program – that is where all the women who are interested in science end up at our school.
The problem of attracting minorities and kids from poor backgrounds and the problem of attracting women are very different, and it is possible that efforts that help attract one group may hurt with another. It is an area for research, that is for sure.
8.
gasstationwithoutpumps | March 5, 2011 at 1:08 pm
I looked at our statistics by gender:
http://planning.ucsc.edu/irps/majors/2008/Fall_UndergraduateMajorsbyGender(HC).pdf
For the School of Engineering, what fraction of declared majors were female in 2008:
Bioinformatics 19%
Bioengineering 26%
Computer Engineering 12%
Computer Game Design 8.4%
Computer Science 11%
Electrical Engineering 8%
Information System Management 11%
So none of the engineering fields here come anywhere close to gender parity, but game design and electrical engineering are the most imbalanced.
9.
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