I have just attended my first Grace Hopper conference organized by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. The conference sold out with over 1400 people attending. There were a few brave men at the conference but the vast majority of the attendees were women (they even changed some of the men’s bathrooms into women’s bathrooms). It was amazing and exciting to see so many technical women in a variety of shapes, colors, ages, and backgrounds. I was impressed with the energy, enthusiasm, and depth of knowledge.
The keynote speaker was Donna Dubinsky who is the founder of a new company Numenta that is trying to design a computer system that reasons using a model based on the neocortex of the brain. She was also president and CEO of Palm and had also co-founded Handspring.
Jeannette M. Wing from Carnegie Mellon University gave a very interesting speech about some of the great open questions in computer science such as, “What is computable?” and “What is intelligence?” I was standing behind Turing Award winner Fran Allen in line for drinks and got to ask her, “what attracted her to her career in computer science at IBM”. She said that she had big student loans and needed the money!
One of the interesting comments I heard was from a student who said that she was surprised at the number of older women at the conference. Many of the students didn’t know who Grace Hopper or Anita Borg were. I had an interesting talk with Kathryn Kleiman about a documentary that she is working on about the female programmers of the ENIAC and how they have never really gotten credit for their work. You can learn more about the female programmers of the ENIAC at www.eniacprogrammers.org.
There is a documentary fundraiser on Thursday, November 8th 2007 from 6pm – 9pm, at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California. Tickets are $100.00 each and you can register at www.google.com/events/eniac.
Everyone has heard of Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs but very few people know about the important contributions of women in computer science. We need to do a better job of recognizing the contributions of women in computing and in educating both men and women about the role women have played in computing!
For more information on Grace Hopper see http://gracehopper.org/2007/about/grace-hopper/.
For more information on Anita Borg see http://anitaborg.org/about/history/anita-borg/.
For more information on the ENIAC programmers see http:// www.eniacprogrammers.org.
Barb Eriscon
CSTA Certification Chair

About six months ago, a group of department chairs, university and technical college faculty, teachers, and parents in South Carolina came together with the goal of bringing back the enrollments in undergraduate programs in computing. Now with the support of the South Carolina Superintendent of Education, Dr. Jim Rex, they are moving ahead on an ambitious plan to revamp high school computer science in South Carolina. Duncan Buell, Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina gave me the following update on the Computing Competitiveness Council’s plan.
Our committee’s goal is to improve students’ future employment opportunities and South Carolina’s share of the knowledge economy. Over the last few months we have developed an analysis of why computing education may be the way it is and a plan for changing the situation for the better.
One of the problems we see is that although there are departments of math, science, and business, there is no “department of computing” in the high schools, and thus there is no focus and no champion of computing per se. Over the long term we hope to change that situation, even if only to create virtual departments of computing comprising faculty from other departments. We feel we have made a major step forward in this direction in that the major guidance brochure for the STEM disciplines now features computer science prominently along with mathematics, science, and pre-engineering.
We have also, at least in the Columbia area where USC is located, identified a school district willing to work with us on curricular issues and program development. In South Carolina, high school students choose a major. Last week the district and I worked out a major in computer science that will be advertised as one of the STEM disciplines. At USC, we are also developing a variation of the ACM/CSTA Level II course that will be suitable for distance delivery and satisfy a state computer science requirement that all too often has turned into a computer literacy requirement.
We also intend to create a distance delivery version of the course and thus to mitigate problems with rural schools and the difficulties faced by school districts in justifying the staffing of computing classes with teachers. The other university participants in the CCC are currently searching for suitable districts in their regions of the state.
Finally, we will be planning teacher preparation courses for summer 2008 both in the new Level II course and in Advanced Placement Computer Science, whose enrollment has shrunk in South Carolina to less than ten percent of that of AP Calculus. As our plans develop, we will be asking the state for support for teachers to induce them to make the effort to prepare for teaching these classes.
Overall, our goal is to coordinate the presentation to students and parents of the message about computing as a discipline and computing as a career and to provide schools with the documentation, support, and teacher preparation necessary to deliver that message. It’s a tall order, but if we do not participate, then we can’t very well complain about what message does get sent.
Duncan Buell
[email protected]