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The IMAGERIA project aims to investigate new paths in recruiting female students in engineering. The first outcome of this project was a one-day pilot workshop called IMAGERIA: Visual computing festival for girls and held in spring 2007. This workshop was based on the hypothesis that hands-on exposure to computer vision algorithms with applications to digital photography may be a significant incentive for female high-school students to enroll in Electrical and Computer Engineering or Computer Science undergraduate programs. The IMAGERIA workshop was structured as a sequence of interactive modules of image processing. As database, the participants were enabled to either use a provided image library or to acquire their own pictures using USB digital cameras. For each module of the workshop, the paper outlines the lessons that were learned and which will allow for further improvements in the structure of the workshop.

Learning core concepts in signal processing courses is difficult for undergraduate students in electrical engineering. In our opinion, this difficulty comes from the gap between understanding the mathematical formalism of such concepts and being able to make sense of them in a practical way.