Revamped computer class luring more women
LOS ANGELES — Veronica Rivera signed up for the introduction to computer science class at Harvey Mudd College mostly because she had no choice: It was mandatory. Programming was intimidating and not for her, she thought.
She expected the class to be full of guys who loved video games and grew up obsessing over how they were made. There were plenty of those guys, but, to her surprise, she found the class fascinating.
She learned how to program a computer to play “Connect Four” and wrote algorithms that could recognize lines of Shakespeare and generate new text with similar sentence patterns.
When that class ended, she signed up for the next level, then another and declared a joint major of computer science and math. Cheering her on were professors who had set out to show her that women belong in computer science just as much as men do.
It’s a message that goes unheard at many universities. Nationwide, according to the Computing Research Association, more than 84 percent of undergraduates who major in computer science are men.
Not so at Harvey Mudd, where more than half — 55 percent — of the latest class of computer science graduates were women, compared with roughly 10 percent a decade ago.
Programming is so popular now in this science and engineering corner of the Claremont Colleges that its professors are campus celebrities and incoming freshmen are excited for classes before ever setting foot on campus.
The school’s breakthrough came when the department’s professors realized that in order to change computer science’s reputation, they had to change how it was taught.
“Computing has an image problem and the faculty just have their work cut out for them,” said Jane Stout, director of CRA’s Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline. “They’ve got to market it. They’ve got to sell it. They’ve got to change all the negative stereotypes.” No longer ‘intimidating’
At Harvey Mudd, the professors made the quizzes more fun and created homework assignments designed to bring groups of students together to solve problems.
“It no longer felt like an intimidating subject,” said Rivera, who is completing her senior project on facialrecognition algorithms with four classmates. “It felt like something that I could learn, that I could really do, even though I hadn’t done any of it in the past.”
Harvey Mudd’s revamped curriculum has been adopted by other schools, including Northwestern and the University of California, Riverside, which are trying to broaden the subject’s appeal.
Increasing gender diversity is particularly important in computer science, a field that has infiltrated every part of modern life but is still primarily dominated by men. Women make up less than one-fifth of tech employees at Google.
“There’s a shortage of raw talent in the field,” said Ran Libeskind-Hadas, a computer science professor who led Harvey Mudd’s curriculum redesign. “Companies are offering six-figure salaries with good benefits to 22-yearolds. For young women not to be able to be part of that economy is just a failing on the part of society.”
Harvey Mudd’s computer science faculty members first began to rethink the way they were teaching the subject in 2005.
The program was producing successful graduates: the chief technology officer of Reddit, a founding engineer of Pinterest, creators of Adobe Flash software and solitaire for Microsoft.
But just as the field was rebounding from the dotcom bust, only a couple of women each semester were signing up for an advanced course in computer science. Removing macho effect
Change needed to begin at the beginning, professors realized. The traditional introductory class was so dry that they drew straws to see who would have to teach it.
Using student feedback, observations from class and a bit of creative social psychology, professors identified three key reasons female students did not major in computer science: They didn’t think they would be good at it, they couldn’t imagine fitting into the culture and they just didn’t think it was interesting.
In the revamped curriculum, instead of having computer science students write arcane code, professors started giving them fun group puzzles and 3-D graphics to create their own games. After freshman year, students were offered research opportunities. They used algorithms to solve evolution questions and analyze DNA sequences.
Females tended to think more about their careers in terms of its social relevance, and how their work could help the world, Libeskind-Hadas said. Many male students who pursued computer science, he found, were more passionate about building personal projects and ideas.
To help female students feel like they belonged, professors found ways to remove the so-called macho effect by which moreexperienced students — usually male — intimidated others by answering all the questions. They pulled those students aside privately and asked them to let others speak. They urged students to save their more advanced conversations for time with teachers outside of class.
Professors also divided the introductory course into sections based on prior experience, so that those who knew nothing were learning together at a comfortable pace — as were those who knew a lot.
Showcasing women in the field has made a difference, too. Today, more than 40 percent of the school’s computer science faculty is female. Students also are offered a paid trip to the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, billed as the largest professional gathering of women in technology.