Attracting And Retaining Women In Computer Science And Engineering: Evaluating The Results

Abstract

Computer science and engineering communities have been exploring a variety of activities and techniques to attract and retain more students, especially women and minorities, to computer science and computer engineering degree programs 1. This paper briefly describes the efforts and results of a plan for actively recruiting young women into undergraduate computer engineering and computer science programs hosted by the University of North Texas (UNT). It also describes a series of activities aimed at improving the retention rate of students already in our programs, particularly during the freshman year. Such recruitment and retention efforts are critical to the country's efforts to increase the number of engineering professionals, and are a priority for the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department at UNT.

Design and development issues for educational robotics training camps

“…Many universities and schools prepare technology and robotic related camp for children such as Carnegie Mellon University (Nourbakhsh et al, 2005), University of Minnesota (Cannon, Panciera, & Papanikolopoulos, 2007;Cannon et al, 2006), University of North Texas (Keathly & Akl, 2007), Lipscomb University (Nordstrom et al, 2009) etc.…”

“…Many universities and schools prepare technology and robotic related summer schools for children (Cannon et al, 2006;Cannon, Panciera, & Papanikolopoulos, 2007;Keathly & Akl, 2007;Nordstrom, Reasonover, & Hutchinson, 2009;Williams, Ma, Prejean, & Ford, 2008). Some of the technology related camps were prepared especially for girls to increase their curiosity and interest toward STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and also increase the possibilities of the engineering careers (Burket, Small, Rossetti, Hill, & Gattis, 2008).…”

Increasing the Enrollment, Retention, and Graduation of Undergraduate Women Majoring in Computing

“…Guiding our work are a wide range of empirically-supported social theories, such as expectancy value [1], social learning [2], social identity [3] and stereotype threat [4], implicit bias [5] and belonging [6]. The program is also influenced by theory and empirical findings particular to recruiting and retaining women at the undergraduate level [7][8][9][10], as well as studies of change in higher education organizations [11][12][13][14].…”