Abstract

The PipeLINK program at Rensselaer, funded by NSF Grant EHR-9450007 (under the Model Projects for Women and Girls program) from 1994-1996, consisted of a collection of activities to connect high school girls, undergraduates, graduate students and faculty in computer science. High school teachers were also crucial participants in the program. The goal of the program was to attract and retain women to computer science through mentoring across the pipeline. Participants at each level received mentoring from above and served as mentors to those below. The program resulted in two publications, an overview of the program [Rodg97], and detailed descriptions of specific activities used in the high school summer program [Rodg96]. These papers, activity handouts, and a complete schedule of the summer program with links can be found on the PipeLINK web site, http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~walkere/pipelink. This paper will review the structure of the high school program, and will then discuss some of the lessons that we learned.

1. Introduction

As part of the PipeLINK program, sixteen local high schools were chosen to participate in activities that would encourage their female students to consider continuing their education in computer science. These activities connected the high school girls to potential mentors in computer science at the undergraduate, graduate or faculty level. The high schools were chosen by their proximity to Rensselaer (none was more that a 30-minute drive away) and by type (to get a mix of girls’ and co-ed schools, public and private schools, and large and small schools). Each high school had one or two teachers designated as primary contacts for the program. While many of these teachers were in mathematics or science departments, others were in business, technology, or the library.

2. Components of the PipeLINK High School Program

While the PipeLINK program consisted of many components, this paper focuses on the components that affected high school students. These components included an "electronic mentoring network," visits to high schools by women professors and students, workshops for teachers at Rensselaer, and activity days for high school girls, also at Rensselaer. In addition, summer programs for undergraduates and high school students were held in the summer of 1995.

2.1. Electronic Mentoring Network

Our original proposal to NSF included an "electronic mentoring network" to connect participants in different locations, and our computer center had promised to put together a private bulletin board system, based on the FirstClass product. As it turns out, our system was delivered late and was never up to the quality that we had hoped for. It became available in January 1995, but was never widely used by the participants, even though we included training in both a teacher workshop and a student activity day. We had somewhat greater success with the system during the summer program, when the students, though they saw each other every day, still managed the time to send numerous emails – the record was about 100 in the two-week period.

2.2 High School visits

Each of the sixteen participating high schools was visited by one of the PI faculty along with a female undergraduate or graduate student at Rensselaer during the 1994-1995 academic year. Two additional visits were made in the following year, one at the request of a teacher and the other at the request of a student from the summer program. The structure of each visit was determined by the contact teacher. At some schools, we stayed in a classroom, and students came to us, while in others, we traveled from classroom to classroom. Other schools had us give a presentation to the computer club after school or to the entire school in a large assembly. Some of the teachers in co-ed schools had us speak only to girls (out of class or after class), while others had us speak to mixed classes. We left the decision entirely up to them.

To allow for maximum flexibility in the school visits, we prepared many different 10-15 minute "modules" that we could present to the class, making them as active as possible. One module, for example, centered on the then-current movie Jurassic Park and introduced computer graphics and image processing using images from the movie. We expanded one very small square from the image until the square pixels were clearly visible, then had the students try to identify which part of the image they were looking at. (They learned that the further away from the screen you are, the easier this is!) Another part of that presentation was to use file sizes to determine that a picture is really worth much more than 1000 words! A second module was the "traveling rock band" problem. (The band needs to visit N cities, but hates riding on the bus, so how do you plan their tour?) By looking at short tours and then longer ones, we were able to introduce students to some of the basic ideas of computational complexity, including the fact that sometimes even faster computers aren’t going to solve problems in a reasonable time.

Rensselaer women undergraduates and graduate students were solicited via email to participate in these visits. Each student visitor was asked to prepare her own 10-minute module. Many of the graduate students prepared interesting and accessible introductions to the areas of their thesis work. Areas like computer-human-interaction and computational geometry were presented using pictures and specific examples. Undergraduates were asked to present something that they had found exciting in their coursework. One undergraduate brought along her own computer to demonstrate some graphics that she had developed. Feedback from the student visitors was overwhelmingly positive. Of course, these students were self-selected, but still, all found the experience of presenting their work to high school students rewarding.

2.3 Teacher workshops

Three workshops were held with the high school teachers over the course of the 1994-1995 academic year. At the first workshop, we presented our ideas for the program to the teachers, and brainstormed on activities to make sure that the students would become involved. The teachers convinced us that our original idea of promoting electronic contact (email and chat groups) between the high schools would not be sufficient for the students to "connect". They suggested that we bring large groups of students to Rensselaer for specific activities, which became the Activity Days of the project. These turned out to be one of the most successful aspects of the program based on student questionnaires. The second workshop was mainly an introduction to the Internet for the high school teachers, most of whom were not yet connected. We also discussed the progress of the program so far, and teachers suggested how we could improve the classroom visits (about half were completed at the time of the second workshop). The third workshop was for planning and promoting the summer program and for evaluating the academic-year component of the program.

2.4 Activity days at Rensselaer

Three Activity Days were held at Rensselaer in January and April of 1995, and in October of 1996. Each four-hour session had girls working on two different projects with a refreshment break in between. Two sessions were run on each day (but each girl only attended one session). Many of the high school teachers and some parents also came to the activity days. Graduate and undergraduate students were recruited as helpers; they wandered around the labs assisting individual students as the activity was presented on the big screen by one of the faculty. Students worked in 25-30 seat laboratories, with at least 2 student helpers per lab. The activities on the first day were an Internet treasure hunt and an experience with L-systems for drawing plants and trees. On the second day, one activity was to learn to use the FirstClass chat rooms and email, and the second was the Internet treasure hunt, or, for students who had already done this, a chance to make their own web page. The third activity day, after the nominal end of the project, repeated successful activities from the summer, including the detective game (expert system) and computer animations.

2.5 Summer Programs

The PipeLINK summer program included four steps along the pipeline. It was run by female computer science faculty, had two female graduate student assistants throughout the program, and also included eight female undergraduates from around the country. These undergraduates came to Rensselaer for a research program with female mentors (8 weeks) and to be counselors for the PipeLINK high school program (2 weeks). The undergraduate students and one of the faculty members (Susan Rodger) lived in the dorms with the high school students; this co-location was a major factor in developing mentoring relationships.

Summer activities include laboratories, visits to research sites, talks by professors and students in many areas of computer science, and presentations by the undergraduates on their research topics. The undergraduates organized social activities for the high school girls in the evenings. A co-ed Summer Scholars group was also on campus during the same week, and we combined many of the lectures and social activities, but laboratories were separate. The dorm that the students stayed in had its own computer laboratory, and many students spent quite a bit of time there refining their projects, particularly their web pages and animations.

The summer laboratory activities included an introduction to the Internet, development of web pages, an introduction to image processing, a hands-on robotics activity, an expert system "detective game", and programming graphical animations. More details on these activities can be found in our SIGCSE paper [Rodg96] and on the web site http://cs.rpi.edu/~walkere/pipelink . Students enjoyed the hands-on activities most, and as mentioned above, continued some of their projects in the evenings. Students were less enthusiastic about the lectures (which were also early in the morning), but did show enthusiasm when their counselors were the ones presenting.

2.6 Evaluation

Evaluation was done by questionnaires at each activity day, teacher workshop, and the end of each week of the summer program. Followup questionnaires were sent to the summer program participants approximately one year after the end of the summer. Generally, students were quite happy with the programs. The most persistent complaints had to do with the logistics of the program – curfew, food, dorm quality, etc. We also heard that lectures should not be held in the morning (in fact, nothing should!) At the time of the initial followup, many of the girls were still in high school, but all of those who graduated were planning to attend college (in one case a community college for two years, with intention of transferring to a four-year college for the last two years). Three of the twenty students enrolled in RPI. At least two pairs of students had remained in contact, and nearly all students continued to use computers, including email, though no one used the FirstClass system that we had set up. Two students had moved during the year without leaving a forwarding address and we were unable to track them down.

3. Lessons Learned

In the process of developing and implementing the PipeLINK program, we learned a number of important lessons. In some cases, these were things that we had done that worked out extremely well; in others, they were things that we wished we would have done.

The contact teachers were extremely beneficial to the program. As two computer science faculty, we knew almost nothing about the way things work in high schools. The teachers were extremely valuable in helping us to reach the students and in recruiting students for our programs. Their input with respect to planning our activities was priceless; as mentioned before, they suggested the activity days, which impacted the greatest number of high school students. Having high school teachers at the activity days, learning along with their students, was exciting and motivating for the students. We also could not have arranged the high school visits without the teachers. Each teacher knew how to structure the visit in his or her own school to best benefit his or her own students. It would have been impossible for us to prepare a single template that would have worked in all schools.

Electronic mentoring does not work without structure and nurturing. We had originally expected that once we put modems and software into the schools, the teachers and students would use them and an electronic community would grow of its own accord. In fact, electronic communities need to be carefully shaped and nurtured, and we did not do this in the PipeLINK project. The strongest electronic contacts were between a pair of girls at different schools that sat together at the second activity day and decided to become pen pals. These two girls were among the most avid of our participants, and at their request, roomed together during the summer program. Efforts that we made to connect Renssleaer students with high school students through electronic mentoring were not sufficiently structured and fizzled out after one or two messages. The electronic chat groups were essentially empty except for days that we held teacher workshops and high school activity days, and a few messages of the form "Is anyone here?? I guess not…". Some of the problems that we had may have been due to the difficulties that we had in getting the network up and running, but the lack of a structured way to get interesting conversations going was the real culprit.

Students prefer hands-on activities where they can be creative. It was pretty clear that students had the most fun in the activity days and the laboratories. The activities that they enjoyed the most were the ones that had the least structure and the most visible product (web pages). Some of the students also really excelled at the animations, where they programmed simple shapes to move around the screen. One pair of students wrote a silly story together (in a chat room) and then dramatized it. As our experience with these students grew, we tried to include more opportunities for creativity in the activities, and also planned times for students to share their work with each other. We ran two successful laboratory open houses, one during the middle weekend and the other at the end of the last day, when parents picked up their students. Students were quite excited to show off their work to their parents and friends.

Technology fails. Especially in the summer program, we were at the mercy of the technology. When thunderstorms caused the servers (and hence all computers on campus) to be down one day during lab time, we found ourselves quickly renting a movie. Some of the activities stressed the systems to the point that it became a mantra for the program: "close it, reboot, and try again". The electronic mentoring network came up late, and was unreliable at first. High schools also had a number of difficulties connecting to the college modems and the Internet. One of the modems that we distributed to the high schools failed and had to be replaced.

There is more to running a high school camp than planning daytime activities. As college faculty, we were most concerned with planning lectures, laboratory exercises and site visits for our students, and didn’t spend as much time as we should on planning rules, curfews, and evening activities. Although it was not originally planned, the fact that one of the faculty lived in the dorm with the students turned out to be very important to keep an eye on the students. We also realized quickly that if we didn’t provide activities for the students, they would find their own and we could have a liability problem. Therefore, we quickly assigned the undergraduates to prepare activities for each evening of the camp. A related problem was running a residential program for students who were so close to home. Nearly every student had to go home for at least one night, and over half of them were gone on the weekend. We compromised by running a reduced schedule on the weekend, but both students that stayed and students that left were unhappy with our compromise. Had we run the program again, it would have been a day camp to avoid many of these issues.

Planning a program for only one year is a mistake. Although we originally envisioned a three-year program, our proposal was accepted with the stipulation that we cut it down to a single year. We also made a logistical mistake, having the funding and the program start simultaneously. Were we to have the same proposal again, we would have had the grant begin in May or June for the following academic year and summer, lasting at least until the following November or December. The first year of the program generated quite a bit of positive publicity, and we continue, even this year, to receive not only information requests, but applications for the program.

Institutional support is crucial. Although the PipeLINK program was a success in many ways, it ended after the 1995 summer program. When the National Science Foundation funding ran out, Rensselaer was unwilling to put money into the program, even though it was helping them with recruiting. On a personal level, there was little support from the department for the level of effort extended by the faculty. We were expected to run the program while maintaining the same course load and level of research effort as other faculty. Although the department and the school both maintained that attracting and retaining women in computer science and engineering was important, it was not important enough for them to devote real resources to.

References