Literature Review 5

(1)Visual-

(2)Citation-Hoffmann, Leah. "What Women Want." Communications of the ACM, vol. 55, no. 9, Sept. 2012, pp. 120-119. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1145/2330667.2330693

(3)Summary- This work is a Q and A with Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College, where they changed the computer science department in various ways because they saw that their was a shortage of women graduating with STEM degrees. They identified various aspects of their program that could be problematic in appealing to young women and changed them. She mentions changing the structure of their introductory class, using a different operating system, and making the curriculum more practical for women. Women are now a much larger percentage of the total graduates with Computer Science degrees.

(4)Author- The author is Leah Hoffmann. But the content comes directly from Klawe in the interview.

(5)Key Terms-
Harvery Mudd College- A private liberal-arts college focusing on mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, and engineering.
Java and Python- High level programming languages.

(6)Quotes-
“to take our introductory course and change it from being a course about learning to program in Java to a course about computational approaches to problem solving.” (120)

“We know from research that for women and minorities, the attraction of computer science is what you can do with it. It doesn’t mean they are not interested in complexity theory or other esoteric parts of the field, it just means that that tends to be the driving motivation.” (120)

"The previous course had been very popular with the small percentage of students who already liked computer science and was absolutely despised by everyone else. And it went, literally in one year, from being the most despised course by almost everybody to the most loved course by everybody."(120)

(7)Value- I think this Q & A is very valuable because it shows that changes can be made in STEM fields, and on a collegiate level in oder to involve more women. Harvey Mudd identified problems and fixed them by making each element more appealing to women. Their changes came with immense success.

(3)