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Educational software can be a valuable tool for teaching and learning at the pre-college level, where the foundation is laid for entry into technology-related fields like computer science and engineering. Like all technology, the promise of educational software to advance learning and spark career interest in these areas also comes with the potential for unintended and unwanted consequences. One of these consequences is gendered outcomes in learning and career interest. Oversight of gender issues in the design and application of educational software, as well as the way it used by teachers in the classroom, can result in technology-based educational experiences that are more appealing to boys than girls, and that ultimately reinforce the gender imbalance in science and technology majors. As a first step toward understanding how educational software design and teacher implementation can achieve and promote gender balance, this paper brings together research from education, sociology, psychology, and computing to explore the interaction between gender and technology education.

While Native Americans make up 6.9% of the population of Arizona, they comprise only 1.9% of the student body at Arizona State University. Additionally, only about 1.9% of the students in Computing and Engineering programs at Arizona State University are Native American. From 1994 to 2005, Native American students constituted between 2% and 3% of Computer Science and Engineering enrollment. Clearly, Native American students are under-represented in computing and engineering in Arizona. This paper describes a curriculum that we are developing to help increase the recruitment of Native American students in the computing programs at Arizona State University.

Statistics indicate that under-represented minority student groups continue to experience high dropout rates, low graduation rates, low enrollment in graduate programs and low participation in Computer Science and Engineering (CS&E). At the same time, trends indicate that these groups will constitute an important part of the population of the United States by year 2050. Given these facts, it is crucial to help these minority groups become an integral part of the economic fabric of the United States. It has been shown that undergraduate research is one of the best vehicles to address several of these important issues. This paper describes our experience running a NSF-sponsored Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site in CS&E for under-represented minority student groups. We describe the most important aspects that need to be included in these programs and some strategies for running them successfully. Finally, we include the results of our evaluation and show the effectiveness of the program.

Electronic portfolios (E-portfolios) provide an excellent vehicle for demonstrating what students have acquired in the way of attitudes, knowledge, skills and abilities during their progress through their selected program of learning. The contribution of this paper is to show how the portfolio process can be applied to a technical discipline? The purpose of the e-portfolios is to provide the opportunity for students to demonstrate their individual skills, guided by their personal goals and their acquired competencies required as per the graduate profile of their degree programmes. Students' participation in the project is on voluntary basis and development of the portfolios is not a part of assessment in the degree programme. Involving personnel from industry for their feedback on the (development) specification of (annotation criteria) life-long learning skills and students portfolios is one of the major aims of this project. Data will be collected from student participants to determine the effectiveness of e-portfolios as a tool for learning.

Arizona State University has created a new School of Computing and Informatics (SCI). SCI currently consists of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Biomedical Informatics. SCI was created to house the core computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, biomedical informatics and other computing and informatics programs and concentrations. The informatics programs will serve as trans-disciplinary bridges to other disciplines. One of the initial activities of the new school was the creation of an information sciences certificate. This paper describes the process used in developing this certificate, the tradeoffs made and the detailed course requirements. Lessons learned regarding how computer science departments can better collaborate with other disciplines on meeting computing educational needs will also be shared.