As part of our responsibilities, we taught an introductory course in our discipline and gave seminars to share our innovations in the classroom in content, pedagogy and classroom climate with other science faculty. The campus is a comprehensive university, emphasizing undergraduate education. But my experience of working with UW-SP students convinced me differently. While leading workshops on methods to attract and retain women in the sciences, I came to understand that teaching the introductory computing course has its unique challenges. The following discussion examines these challenges in the computing field, encourages faculty to share these concerns with students and offers some solutions.
Men look at computers as toys, women as tools.
Men want to play with computers but women want to do something useful with them. Games, programming, electronic mail and now the World Wide Web. These time consuming, captivating applications encourage focused and obsessive behavior, a trait not encouraged in women. By the time students enter college, many have already weeded themselves out of majoring in computing. Nevertheless, those who do come into the field enter with a great disparity of knowledge.