If you could spend the rest of your career staring at a computer surrounded by antisocial nerds, would you? Neither would female students at Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. That’s what Computer Science (CS) teacher Pat Yongpradit found when he asked them why they didn’t continue with upper-level CS courses after taking his introductory class. “It was mainly because of the overall experience and environment in the upper-level classes -- it’s mostly male dominated and kind of geeky,” he says. “That’s not really appealing to social, well-rounded, intelligent women.”

In response, Yongpradit founded the Springbrook Women in Technology (SWiT) club to show girls how diverse and interesting technology and CS can be. Once a month the girls get together to work on projects, like programming games on Microsoft Zunes or using the 3D educational programming kit Alice. The results are promising, too -- seven girls have signed up for next year’s AP-level Computer Programming 2 class, up from four this year. The club itself has almost tripled in size since it’s founding three years ago. Yongpradit says he hopes SWiT helps girls form social connections so they don’t feel isolated as they move through the Computer Science track.

SWiT members confirm Yongpradit’s assertion that girls felt alienated. Club co-president Amita Jain says it was hard to be a girl in a CS class when she was a freshman. “It was intimidating at first because we sat in the corner and the entire classroom was guys,” she says. “They would just talk and make jokes and stuff.” Co-president Sydney Harmon elaborates on the distance they felt from their classmates: “We would just sit there [thinking] we don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The two juniors have been in SWiT since it’s founding, when they were in ninth grade. Amita credits the club with her decision to keep taking CS classes. She says the women speakers the club has invited from companies including Microsoft and Lockheed-Martin inspired her: “If they didn’t come speak to us I probably wouldn’t have continued.” The two say they have also encouraged their female friends to take CS classes after finding out how much fun they were. That’s been the focus of SWiT recently, Sydney says. “This year was mostly about getting girls interested in computer science and just showing them that they can feel comfortable.” The numbers show they’re succeeding; Amita says the introductory CS class is about half women this year, a far cry from when she was among the handful of female students sitting in the corner.

Amita stresses that CS can be very different from how it’s often perceived: “[Programming is] actually a really social thing. We help each other a lot. You can be really creative with it [too].” Yongpradit says SWiT is in line with national efforts to reform CS education by making it more social and creative. He says making games is a great way to blend these elements into learning computer programming. Last year he won an Innovative Educator award from Microsoft for his SWiT project creating games on Zunes. Now he’s focused on a site called Interrobang, that combines social networking and computer programming with a points system that rewards players for accomplishing real-world tasks.

See SWiT’s website at http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/schools/springbrookhs/signature/computer-science.shtml

Image caption: Pat Yongpradit with Springbrook Women in Technology; Image courtesy of Pat Yongpradit

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