Media Release

Cornell University Awarded NSF Broadening Participation in Computing Grant

December 14, 2006
Ithaca, NY

Contact:
Laura Cima
607.254.8757

Cornell University has been awarded nearly $600,000 by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to lead a Demonstration Project for NSF's Broadening Participation in Computing program (BPC). The project, titled Worlds for Information Technology and Science (WITS), will explore an innovative approach to attracting women and underrepresented minorities to computing fields. The project will be led by Dr. David Gries, associate dean for undergraduate programs in Engineering and professor of Computer Science, and Margaret Corbit, director of SciCentr.org and the Cornell Theory Center's (CTC) outreach manager. Gries and Corbit are leaders in the development of undergraduate education in computer science and the use of new media for outreach education, respectively.

"Computing has broadened to encompass almost all fields," says Gries. "This grant will help us to not only attract Cornell students into computing but will also serve to build awareness of and excitement for computing in secondary schools. At the same time, we ourselves will be learning about what does and does not work in teaching computing at these levels."

WITS will broaden the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in computing through the use of service learning to encourage them to enter computing fields. Service learning has been shown to appeal to higher percentages of women and minorities by providing contextualized learning and community building that enhances self confidence. The proposed project includes the development of a new 4-credit course. The course, Computing in Context, will be listed through and sponsored by Cornell's Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS). CIS is a cross-cutting, college-level entity supporting both interdisciplinary academic fields of study and concentrated degree programs.

The WITS project will also support the creation of CYCentr/CYFair, an associated service-outreach program in which undergraduates enrolled in Computing in Context serve as mentors to middle school students. CYCentr will build on the success of CTC's SciCentr/SciFair outreach program, which uses the medium of online virtual worlds to attract and retain middle school students in education. CYFair will focus on computing and information science and building foundation computing skills at the middle school level.

"As was underscored by participants and presenters at the Kickoff Meeting for the BPC program in Atlanta, each institution of higher education is unique; programs developed at or for one institution will not always transfer seamlessly to other sites," says Corbit. "With this in mind, we have recruited representatives from a range of service-learning communities to participate in content development to ensure that our model will be valuable and useful in a variety of settings."

To ensure scalability and adaptability of the program model, the approach will be tested at three geographically dispersed institutions: Pennsylvania State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center. These trial sites will be engaged from the beginning in program development, and they have fully committed to running adapted projects at their home institutions.

Research associated with the WITS project focuses on project evaluation led by Jennifer Wofford, Assistant Dean, Cornell CIS. "Although WITS will focus on underrepresented groups, this project holds the promise of improving research, education, and outreach for all students in computing," says Wofford.