Lamar University’s Women In Research Development is hosting three Girls WIRED for Computer Science camps this summer. The Nederland High School camp will be held on the afternoons of July 10-14. The Central Middle School camp will be held on Saturday July 15, and the Port Neches Middle School camp will be held on Saturday August 5. All of the camps will be held on the Lamar Campus, in Lab 215 of the Maes Building.

These are pilot camps that are supported by a Texas Engineering and Technology Consortium Texas Workforce Development (TWD) grant and grants from ExxonMobil. Lamar University Computer Science Professor Peggy Doerschuk and Assistant Professor Jiangjiang Liu developed the pilot camps in partnership with the three schools. Officials and teachers at the schools were of great assistance in selecting the content of the camps and recruiting camp participants. We plan to use the experience gained in the pilot camps to design future camps that will be open to the public. We are currently seeking funding to support the future camps.

These camps are designed to expose girls to computer science and some of its many beneficial applications. The camps will engage girls in fun hands-on learning labs in programming robots, computer hardware, and designing Web pages. No experience is necessary. The girls will work in teams, with Lamar students helping the teams with their hands-on activities. Student helpers include Women in Research Development team members Iris Beltran, Rose Hogan, Xing Jin, and Bindiya Mansharamani, and graduate students Nilam Chand and Puspa Mahat. Dr. Doerschuk and Dr. Liu will lead the camps.

Girls often lose interest in computer science at an early age because of the misconception that computing is a solitary occupation with no social benefit and is exclusively for males. We hope to dispel these misconceptions.

The middle school camps will show girls that computing can be fun and is not just for boys. The high school camp will also expose young women to many useful applications of computing in medicine, science, engineering, business, and entertainment and give them information on many types of careers in computing and how to prepare for them. The high school girls will also have an opportunity to talk to computing students and professionals, both men and women, who have chosen computing as their careers. Our guest speakers include Michael Koch, Senior Project Manager at Christus Health, Susan Mayfield, Project Director for Professional Services at Hansen Information Technologies, Inc., and Linda Koetter, Director of Central Computing at Lamar University. All three are graduates from Lamar University.

It’s important to attract girls to computing because we are facing a shortage of computing professionals in the US and women are underrepresented in CS. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), computer occupations are expected to be among the fastest growing occupations in the United States through 2014. However, the number of computer science degrees awarded in the US has decreased dramatically in recent years. In the last decade, less than 20% of computer science bachelor’s degrees awarded in the US went to women. By increasing the participation of women in computing we will not only help meet the growing demands of our high-tech society but also strengthen the discipline by the infusion of their diverse ideas and perspectives.