Contrasting Women’s Experience in CS at
Different Institutions
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Mark Guzdial
College of Computing/GVU
Georgia Tech
Our Goal: Ubiquitous Computing Education
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Computing as part of a liberal education (Alan
Perlis)
Strategy: Relevance, opportunities for creativity,
social context
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Pick a good context, and the rest comes for free.
CS1315 Introduction to Media Computation
 Overall, CS1315 has been 51% female
 About 300 students/term
 Required in Architecture, Management, Ivan Allen
College of Liberal Arts, and Biology
 Focus: Learning programming and CS concepts
within the context of media manipulation and
creation
 Converting images to grayscale and negatives, splicing and
reversing sounds, writing programs to generate HTML,
creating movies out of Web-accessed content.
 Computing for communications, not calculation
Positive Results
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Success rates (earned A, B, or C) rose from 71.2%
to around 90%
“I just wish I had more time to play around with that
and make neat effects. But JES [course development
environment] will be on my computer forever, so…
that’s the nice thing about this class is that you could
go as deep into the homework as you wanted. So, I’d
turn it in and then me and my roommate would do
more after to see what we could do with it.”
But let’s move on…
A single class doesn’t
change enough.
Results: Follow-on Email Survey
In Spring 2004, contacted all 2003 CS1315
students.
19% had written a Python program on their own
since the class had ended.
27% had edited media that they hadn’t previously.
“Definitely makes me think of what is going on
behind the scenes of such programs like Photoshop
and Illustrator.”
“I feel more comfortable around computers and like
I could learn and understand other computer
programming languages more easily.”
Creating new options:
An alternative path into Computing

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Created a CS minor.
Allow CS majors to take our introductory
computing media computation sequence.
Created a new BS in Computational Media.
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Joint between College of Computing and School
of Literature, Culture, and Communications
½ CS, and ½ drama theory, performance art, film
studies, etc.
~40 students in first semester, 30% female
A Multimedia CS2 in Java
 Follow-on course started
Spring 2005: Representing
Structure and Behavior.
 Teaching linked lists, trees,
stacks, and queues in a
media context.
 Modeling, scene graphs,
linked lists of music
elements, etc.
75% female
First posting to CS1316 CoWeb
(Female architecture major)
I'm really excited to be in the class,
although it's kinda funny since I don't
have to take it. Programming is fun, and
if that makes me weird, then I'm weird.