Bringing Young Minority Women to the Threshold of Science

该项目旨在通过为少数民族年轻女性提供丰富的技能、激励措施和榜样，从而使她们对未来的科学职业产生兴趣，从而为她们的职业选择提供基础。24名9、10年级的女高中生和6名高中科学教师将参加由4名学生和1名指导教师组成的软件团队的为期10天的暑期培训。这些团队将在夏季课程之后的学年中制作高质量的科学教育软件。这6支队伍将从华盛顿特区选出。这种模式的意义在于，它能够为一群年轻的少数族裔女性和她们的老师提供机会，让她们在使用健全的软件工程原则的程序员团队的背景下使用前沿技术，并生产出高质量的科学教育软件，这些软件将由商业软件开发人员评估，以便进行可能的商业生产和发行。此外，年轻的少数族裔女性将能够在为其他学习者开发科学教育软件的背景下反思自己的思维和学习方式，而教师将增加他们的专业经验范围，包括研究数据收集和学术期刊文章的报告。

This project is designed to interest young minority women in future careers in science by providing them with an enrichment of skills, incentives, and role models upon which to base their career choices. Twenty-four female high school students in grades 9 or 10 and 6 high school science teachers will be selected to participate in a 10 day summer training program to prepare them to work on software teams composed of 4 students and one teacher advisor. The teams will produce high quality science education software during the school year following the summer session. The 6 team will be chosen from the Washington, DC area. The significance of this model lies in its ability to provide a group of young minority women and their teachers the opportunity to use leading edge technology in the context of programmer teams using sound software engineering principles and to produce high quality science education software that will be evaluated by commercial software developers for possible commercial production and distribution. In addition, young minority women will be able to reflect upon their thinking and learning styles in the context of developing science education software for other learners while teachers will increase their range of professional experiences to include research data collection and reporting for a scholarly journal article.