HOUSTON– Girls in eight Houston high schools will soon find computer science classes more attractive and welcoming to them, thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation that will support a project of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education (CEEE) at Rice. The CEEE has won a three-year, $800,000 grant to help bring more girls into the study of computer science. In collaboration with the Houston Independent School District (HISD), the CEEE will conduct the Computer Science Computing and Mentoring Partnership (CS-CAMP), a demonstration project to develop and evaluate a support program that enhances the interest and persistence of female students in pre-college computer science.

Through the program, computer science teachers from eight HISD high schools will receive training in a variety of approaches to instruction and to reinforce their knowledge of computer science. Each school will choose 16 female students who will attend a two-week camp at Rice, working with the teachers from their schools. The camp will focus on community building, computing-career awareness, mentoring, introductory computing courses, and having fun with computer science. Afterward, the students will attend monthly meetings at Rice to work on programming projects to reinforce what they learned in the summer. These teachers and girls will participate in the program for two years. “Teachers and counselors at these schools will be asked to choose girls who are leaders to participate in the program,” said Cynthia Lanius, principal investigator on the project and executive director of the CEEE. “We think that if girls who are leaders sign up for computer science courses, other girls will be drawn into them too. Our goal is to increase the number of girls taking advanced computer classes in these schools so that half of the students in these classes are female. We hope that the participating schools will become national models for quality computer science programs.”

The Center for Excellence and Equity in Education (CEEE) seeks to promote greater participation of underrepresented groups in the sciences, and to encourage academic excellence for all through a variety of programs aimed at both the K-12 and higher education communities. The center is directed by Richard Tapia, Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics. Tapia is a noted leader in national efforts to increase the number of minorities and women in engineering and science.

For questions about CS-CAMP, email Michael Sirois (msirois@rice.edu).

—Ann Lugg
   Originally published in the George R. Brown School of Engineering News, August 11, 2002