Strategic Rebranding of Computing Courses

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What is the Action?

Rebrand computing courses, which includes possible renaming and revising contents of the courses to make them more attractive to female applicants.

Quick Facts to Support this Action

The University of California, Berkeley, renamed their introductory computing course for non-majors from “Introduction to Symbolic Programming” to “Beauty and the Joy of Computing” and it resulted in recruitment of more female than male students for the first time.

  • Harvey Mudd College rebranded their introductory class from “Introduction to programming in Java” to “Creative approaches to problem solving in science and engineering using Python,” and reports show that it became one of the effective actions to increase their female computing students from 10% to 40% in four years.

Examples on How to Implement This Action

Using more people-oriented as well as creative wordings rather than things-oriented wordings, for example, wordings “students”, “creative problem solving”, “people”, “companies”, rather than “software”, “programming” and “systems”.

➤ Trinity College Dublin

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, renamed their M. Sc. In Multimedia Systems, to M. Sc. Interactive Digital Media, and the course has been reported to consistently attract a gender balanced pool of applicants (the researcher of TechMate completed this course).

➤ Harvey Mudd & University of California

Harvey Mudd College and the University of California did not just rename their introductory computing courses, they also modified their content to make it more appealing to female applicants. For instance, the decision has been made at Harvey Mudd to replace Java with Python, to make programming easier to learn for novice programmers. Berkeley started each of their class with a discussion of a recent tech news article and added pair programming exercises.

Review the current curriculum to reflect the degree’s title and description, and ensure there are practical and people-oriented projects included in the curriculum.

Evaluation Approach

The most straightforward way to see the impact of this action is to see the change in recruitment numbers, especially of those among underrepresented gender groups. 

Alternatively, an intermediate impact is to be seen where feedback is collected from the first year students about their reasonings for choosing the recently rebranded programme. Themes for the feedback questionnaire:

  • Gender information;
  • Whether the enrolled students’ first choice was this programme (and what other choices were involved);
  • What were the reasons of choosing this programme.

Resources

The Beauty and Joy of Computing – Berkeley Introductory Computing Course https://bjc.berkeley.edu/

K.V. Brown (2014). Tech shift: More women in computer science classes. Retrieved from

https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/Tech-shift-More-women-in-computer-scienceclasses-5243026.php

Wallace, C. (2016). The Gender Ratio In Tech Is Getting Worse, Says New Research. Forbes. Retrieved from

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinawallace/2016/10/20/girls-in-coding-the-problem-is-getting-worse/

Grabarczyk, P., Freiesleben, A., Bastrup, A., & Brabrand, C. (2022, July). Computing Educational Programmes with more Women are more about People & less about Things.
In Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, Vol. 1 (pp. 172–178).