Information Technology Education

For several months, I always carried a deck of cards in my backpack. I like playing gin rummy as much as anyone, but that's not the reason why. I carried them because I had discovered Computer Science Outreach Magic . I learned a Computer Science magic trick from cs4fn.org/magic , and I've been hooked ever since. I've performed this trick to much success when manning booths at outreach events and teacher visiting days. It lets you engage people while illustrating a bit of computer science. At the PyLadies ' lunch at PyCon '13 , Esther Nam convinced me to write a blog post about this card trick I was so excited about. "Lots of people want to know how to demonstrate computer science without a computer!" she said. Teaching the card trick to Computer Science student volunteers at the Tucson Festival of Books. Performing the big reveal at a University of Arizona College of Science ceremony.  That's exactly why I love this trick. It's portable, it'...

(...or at least how I did) I wanted to write this blog post because: I'm proud of the brochure I made for my CS department when I was a member of the CS Ambassadors club, one year ago. I realized that my CS department wasn't all that great at describing what it was about—and I imagine it isn't just my university that has this problem. I believe that if a department can't describe Computer Science in an intriguing way at university and outreach events, they're throwing away a valuable method of drawing in new students. Mainly those who already know about Computer Science before college will enroll, which bodes badly for diversity in your department. Here is the original flyer (click to enlarge if you like). To be fair, it's more an "intro to the major" brochure than an outreach brochure, which could explain the wordiness. But that can't explain the picture of a guy looking into what I assume is a chemistry machine? Or the idea that one of the best j...

I'm attending/volunteering at PyData , and it's been great. Tutorials on pandas , Matplotlib , and NumPy were very useful, and meeting real-world data scientists is fantastic. Volunteering is a great excuse for saying hello to people (like Google director of research Peter Norvig !), as is helping attendees with their Matplotlib questions. I was moved to blog by a panel featuring heavy contributors to major open source Python packages, including SciPy , pandas , IPython , scikit-learn , and CherryPy . This discussion and my observations of the PyCon sprints have changed my mindset: contributing to open source software has become much less intimidating! I want everyone to have this feeling, but particularly female students, because we are especially underrepresented in the OSS (open source software) world. Even small contributions to projects could be a way to impress employers, and could help change the ratio in CS overall. The moderator asked the panelists about non-typica...

     My department head convinced me and another senior in the Computer Science department to be "career panelists" at a local one-day conference meant to introduce science careers to middle school girls.      Sometimes CS gets left out of the "STEM" conversation, and this event was a good example: my classmate and I were the only advocates for computing, and there were no technology workshops at all, despite hands-on virtual reality and robotics events being advertised. There were fantastic astronomy, biology, and chemistry workshops however.      I mentioned this to the organizer, and she reminded me that it was a completely volunteer-run event, and no one volunteered to offer technology workshops . I wondered how much responsibility the organizers had for reaching out to people in technology, or in that case reaching out to minority speakers (all presenters I saw were Caucasian, while the students were 90% Latina), but tha...