College of Computing Using Google Funding to Close CS Diversity Gap: Barb Ericson’s Project Rise Up 4 CS
July 22, 2016 at 7:52 am 4 comments
Project Rise Up 4 CS and Sisters Rise Up 4 CS are really great ideas (see previous blog posts on the work presented at SIGCSE and at RESPECT) — though I’m obviously biased in my opinion. I’m grateful that Google continues to support Barb’s project, and the College did a nice write up about her efforts.
In fact, according to ongoing data analysis by Barbara Ericson, director of computing outreach for the Institute for Computing Education (ICE) for the Georgia Tech College of Computing, “The disparity here is so great that in 2015 10 U.S. states had fewer than 10 girls take the Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science (CS) A course exam while 23 states had fewer than 10 black students take the exam.”
In an interview with the New York Times late last year Ericson said working to solve tech industry’s gender and racial diversity gap is important “because we don’t have enough people studying computer science in the United States to fill the projected number of jobs in the field.”
To address this problem and prepare more high school students for computer science careers, the College of Computing established RISE Up 4 CS in 2012.
Leveraging Google RISE Award funding, the RISE Up 4 CS program offers twice-a-week webinars and monthly in person sessions at Georgia Tech to prepare underrepresented students to succeed in taking the APCS A course exam and class. For the webinars, students use a free interactive e-book developed by Ericson to learn about searching and sorting data, and the fundamentals of JAVA.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: BPC, computing for all, computing for everyone, NCWIT.
Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
1.
AP CS A Exam Data for 2016: Barb Ericson’s analysis, Hai Hong’s guest blog post #CSedWeek | Computing Education Blog | December 5, 2016 at 7:13 am
[…] Hong of Google did a much nicer summary than the one I usually put together. Barb’s work with Project Rise Up 4 CS and Sisters Rise Up have received funding from the Google Rise program, which Hai is part of. I’m including it […]
2.
Helping students succeed in AP CS: GT Computing Undergraduate Female Rising Up to Challenge in CS | Computing Education Blog | July 26, 2017 at 9:01 am
[…] why Barbara’s Rise Up programs are so important. She’s helping female and African-American students succeed in the CS that’s in their […]
3.
SIGCSE 2018 Preview: Black Women in CS, Rise Up 4 CS, Community College to University CS, and Gestures for Learning CS | Computing Education Research Blog | February 21, 2018 at 7:00 am
[…] Students Succeed in AP CSA and Beyond, which are the amazing results from the alumni study from her Project Rise Up effort to help underrepresented students succeed at Advanced Placement CS A. When Barb was deciding […]
4.
Announcing Barbara Ericson’s Defense on Effectiveness and Efficiency of Parsons Problems and Dynamically Adaptive Parsons Problems: Next stop, University of Michigan | Computing Education Research Blog | March 12, 2018 at 7:00 am
[…] did her dissertation on adaptive Parsons problems, but she could have done it on Project Rise Up or some deeper analysis of her years of AP CS analyses. She chose well. Her results are fantastic, […]