Participation in Computing: The National Science Foundation’s Expansionary Programs

Product Description This book provides a history of the efforts of the US National Science Foundation to broaden participation in computing. The book briefly discusses the early history of the NSF's involvement with education and workforce issues. It then turns to two programs outside the computing directorate (the ADVANCE program and the Program on Women and Girls) that set the stage for three programs in the NSF computing directorate on broadening participation: the IT Workforce Program, the Broadening Participation in Computing program, and the Computing Education for the 21st Century program. The work looks at NSF-funded research and NSF-funded interventions both to increase the number of women, underrepresented minorities (African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians) and people with disabilities, and to increase the number of public schools offering rigorous instruction in computing. Other organizations such as the ACM, the Computer Science Teachers Association, and Code.org are also covered. The years covered are primarily 1980 to the present. From the Back Cover This text presents a focus on the efforts of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to broaden participation in computing of women, underrepresented minorities (especially African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians), and people with disabilities. The work illuminates a mostly overlooked aspect of NSF’s history, and provides an historical framework to the social scientists working on current Sloan Foundation grants related to underrepresentation in computing.Topics and features:Discusses the importance and extent of underrepresentation in computingSurveys the coevolution of computing and the NSF since the end of the Second World WarDescribes the history of NSF programs intended to broaden participation in the computing and STEM disciplines up to the present dayExamines in detail the Alliances formed under the NSF Broadening Participation in Computing program – arguably NSF’s most successful activity in this realmReviews NSF’s recent effort to revitalize formal K-12 education in the United StatesContrasts these formal efforts with more informal startup efforts to provide informal computer educationThis important study will be of great value to a broad audience including social scientists and learning scientists interested in computing, computer scientists interested in issues of education or diversity, science policymakers, and historians of science and technology.Dr. William Aspray is the Bill and Lewis Suit Professor of Information Technologies in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. His other Springer publications include Women and Underrepresented Minorities in Computing, Formal and Informal Approaches to Food Policy and Food in the Internet Age.