Outreach and community service
This is my outside the office thing: I work on encouraging K12 school students, especially women and minorities, to to pursue careers in science and computing, and I promote computational thinking among people from all backgrounds. My long-term goals with this work are to motivate a higher diversity and stronger participation in computing, and to encourage people to solve problems across domains by using a computational approach.
To get things going on a local level, I founded and lead a program that provides middle school students at a public school with opportunities to discover and practice basic principles of computing and computational thinking through fun activities:
- We originally started running the program ("CS Prep") at the Pittsburgh Milliones 6-12 University Preparatory School (UPrep) in Spring 2010. This program was created in coordination with the School of Education and the Learning Policy Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
- Since Fall 2010, we are running the program (now named "Computational Thinking") at the Pittsburgh Science & Technology Academy.
Below are some pictures from another event; the Computer Science Track at the Annual High School Day at CMU, which I have been managing for the last four years.
2010 CS Track at High School Day - with Kenny Joseph, Manya Sleeper, Sypraseuth Vandy:
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Many of the activities that I am engaged in are supported by Women@SCS at Carnegie Mellon. Led by Dr. Carol Frieze, Women@SCS is a very active and supportive group - check out their website for plenty of information and resources.