BPC-LSA: STRONG Computing Pipeline

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Wayne State University, in partnership with local community organizations, proposes a demonstration project that integrates K-12 outreach activities, pre-college bridge programs, and undergraduate computing degree programs in Detroit, MI to increase the participation and success of under-represented students in computer science, particularly African-Americans and women. The pipeline is novel in that it joins K-12 outreach efforts with adult learners and undergraduate students in an urban context. The pipeline will offer a selection of summer camps, Saturday classes, after school and in-school programs in conjunction with community organizations having experience with the K-12 educational processes and with recruiting minority students. These activities will target students from 2nd grade through high school. Parents will also participate, in the form of parent cafés, in which they engage in dialog with computing educators about how to support and encourage their children in the computing disciplines. Finally, the project will offer pre-college and first year bridge instruction which remediates academic deficiencies and explicitly prepares disadvantaged students for undergraduate education in the computing disciplines.All pipeline activities will incorporate a suite of interventions designed to explicitly counter stereotype threat, promote a growth-oriented mindset, and encourage learning as well as feelings of self-efficacy, particularly with respect to the computing disciplines. These activities include coaching of students and teachers about the growth-oriented nature of intelligence, developing and providing culturally-relevant role models who demonstrate striving and a growth-oriented view of intelligence, and asking the students to develop themselves or Alice-generated representations of self as role models and exemplars of striving and learning for others. Similar interventions have been shown to eliminate a significant share of the black-white achievement gap in urban settings; this project is the first to explore their use in large scale for computer science and engineeringeducation.