Need - Connecting and widening the pipeline for women and minorities in IT
Discussions with IT teachers in middle and high schools in the Lehigh Valley confirm national trends. The number of computer science degrees awarded to women declined from 35.8% to 22% between 1984 and 2002 (Robb 2003). The trend has worsened with overall declines in CS enrollments. Computing Research News reports that “interest in CS among women fell 80 percent between 1998 and 2004, and 93 percent since its peak in 1982” (Vegso 2005). As Camp (1999) observes, “the computing community cannot sit back and assume that as the numbers of students rises, the percentage of women students will automatically rise and that the ‘[incredible shrinking pipeline] will take care of itself.’ We must take direct action to attract and retain more women to computing at all points in the pipeline (i.e., K-12, undergraduate, graduate, faculty and industry).” Indeed, the pipeline shrinks even before female students get to high school. One high school in our region reports having just one girl out of 125 students in IT elective courses. A look at Taulbee Reports for Computer Science enrollments indicates that the situation for minority students is similar. A recent tour of Historically Black Institutions around the country by Microsoft Founder, Bill Gates is designed to highlight the need for more aggressive action to increase the number of women and minorities who pursue college degrees in IT/computer science.
To enhance the quality and diversity of the American workforce, it is essential to encourage minority and women students to pursue college degrees in IT fields, where the demand in the work force is expected to grow for the next decade. Based on discussions with regional teachers and administrators and projected demands for a future workforce in the field of IT, Lehigh University is proposing to create a year round LAUNCH-IT (Students That Are Ready for information Technology) Program, as an extension of the highly successful S.T.A.R. (Students That Are Ready) Academies. The LAUNCH-IT Program will follow the successful model of S.T.A.R., utilizing existing structures and partnerships of the S.T.A.R. Academies, with a focus on IT.
LAUNCH-IT will provide a year-round program designed to connect and widen the school-based curricula segments of an educational pipeline put in place the Lehigh Valley Partnership for Teaching Fellows (LVPTF), an NSF GK-12 project hosted at Lehigh University. At the middle school level, curricula has been introduced for web page design using Macromedia Dreamweaver™ and animation using Macromedia Flash™ and using mobile robotics technology to explore a large simulated Martian Landscape. At the high school level, a novel “design-first” approach to learn object-oriented software development in Java has been introduced (Moritz 2005a, Moritz 2005b). Math skills will also be developed at the middle school level continually with the help of the web-based “24” game, encouraging achievement through competition, and helping weaker students learn and develop math strategies for success. Extending these novel curricula in new directions, with hands-on activities, multimedia courseware and intelligent tutoring support, constitute the intellectual merits of this proposal. Its broad impacts begin by recruiting students from schools with high percentages of minority, low-income students, and getting teachers and parents from these schools involved in the program.
LAUNCH-IT will connect the pipeline by providing summer, weekend and after school programs that recruit from LVPTF-impacted schools, build on what they have learned, and provide the consistent mentoring and parental involvement that have made S.T.A.R. successful. It will also widen the pipeline by offering to train and support teachers in other regional schools prioritizing high minority, low-income students, to implement the school-based GK-12 curricula, so that students in these schools can also participate in LAUNCH-IT In other words, LAUNCH-IT teams will offer in-service training to teachers at other schools and offer to help them introduce the curricula during the school year. As a result, more students will be exposed to successful GK-12 curricula and be ready to participate in LAUNCH-IT