Women are vanishing from computer-science programs. Can the Scribbler lure them back?
Robots roughly the size and shape of large turtles — if turtles were bright blue, with wheels on either side and a pen-sized hole in the center — scuttle along the floors of a women’s liberal-arts college in Pennsylvania and a technology institute in Georgia. They draw squares. They run away from lights. They play the tune “La Cucaracha” and the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
They may also save computer science in America.
Enrollment in undergraduate computer-science programs has dipped all over the country, and among women it has almost vanished, dropping 70 percent between 2000 and 2005, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology. “Nationally, we’re in a crisis,” says Tucker Balch, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing.
Observers cite different reasons for the drop — the dot-com bust a few years ago is one — but universities are beginning to agree on one cause that is within their control: Computer-science courses are, well, boring.
“You walk into an intro class, and you start learning a programming language that eventually gets a machine to spit out a string of numbers,” says Lucy Sanders, chief executive of the women-and-technology center. “That’s not what computing is about. Computing is about solving real problems in medicine, or oceanography, and that’s what people who do it love. But the intro courses don’t teach that at all.”
Enter the robots, small machines called Scribblers. As part of a joint project at Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr College this past semester, students received the robots on the first day of introductory classes and, by writing 14 lines of code, got them to move. “The idea is to convey key components of computing, like control over the machine,” says Mr. Balch. “It’s very practical, and students see immediate results.”
“The robots really surprised me,” says Michelle Beard, a Bryn Mawr freshman. “I guess I was expecting a lot of hard-core programming. So I was really happy to see robots.”
Ms. Beard says she was a member of her high-school robotics club back in Oklahoma, but she was the only girl, and the boys never let her get near the robot. “They took it over,” she says. “And they were like ‘OK, Michelle, you take pictures of it and update the Web site.’”
This year Ms. Beard and her fellow students got a lot closer. After dropping a pen in the hole in the middle of the robot, they had to program it to draw squares. The project called for them to string together a set of instructions: Go straight for a few feet, turn 90 degrees, repeat four times. That’s a programming loop, a key concept. (They also learned the important lesson that robots are not perfect. A Scribbler has no compass and can’t make a precise 90-degree turn.)
To learn another key concept, known as “conditional control flow,” they had to direct the robot to follow a light — Scribblers have light sensors — by telling it to move in the light’s direction.
The idea to use the robots grew out of Georgia Tech’s unsuccessful effort in the late 1990s to get every student to take computer science. “We ran into a big problem: a 30-percent withdraw, D, or fail rate,” says Mr. Balch. The intro courses were turning students off. So Tech started another course using video and audio. “We taught students to create images and sounds by programming,” Mr. Balch says. “They got it, and they liked it. Our W/D/F rate dropped to 16 percent.” Robots seemed like another appealing teaching tool.
Lack of Exposure
Courses built solely around programming languages are often particularly intimidating to women because many have never been exposed to them before, says Merrilea J. Mayo, director of the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable at the National Academies. “Boys have,” she says. “They play with circuit boards in high school. So when girls start a college computer class, they sense that everyone around them knows more than they do. It’s uncomfortable.”
Ms. Mayo, an engineer by training, remembers those same feelings from her own early courses. She caught up to everyone else in about a year and a half, she says, but the early going was tough.
Robots are not the only way to ease that discomfort. Earlier in this decade, Carnegie Mellon University increased women’s enrollment in computer science from 7 percent to 40 percent in just a few years. The university did so in part by dropping the prerequisite that students already have programming experience and by starting a mentorship program for women, using upperclassmen.
The problem with applying that approach elsewhere is that it takes a lot of staff time and money, says Bryan K. Barnett, a manager in the external-research program at Microsoft Research, which provided money for the Scribbler project. “Our concern is that something like that isn’t scalable to other colleges,” he says.
Not so, contends Jane S. Margolis, a social scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles who helped design the Carnegie Mellon project and write the book Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (MIT Press, 2002). Reconsidering admissions requirements doesn’t take unusual effort, she says: “A lot of what they did is possible elsewhere.” But the robot project is exciting as well, she adds. “I think it’s based on principles of good teaching, and it could be a real draw. It actually sounds like a course that I’d like to be in.”
Both Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr intend to compare results of their courses with similar courses taught without robots, but the test scores and other benchmarks are not in yet. There are, however, some other hopeful signs emerging. Bryn Mawr students spent time outside of class programming their robots to dance, something that Mr. Balch says they would not have done if they were not enjoying it. They also noted in end-of-semester questionnaires that they had learned problem solving, which was a course goal.
And at Georgia Tech, there were six women in the class alongside 29 men. None of the six dropped out.
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 53, Issue 39, Page A29