BRAID Progress

Since 2014, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) has made the following progress in the areas
committed to the BRAID initiative:

Progress towards modifying introductory courses to make them more attractive and less intimidating to under-represented students

CSCE 1010 Computer Science Principles has been added as a course all students at the University of North Texas may take to fulfill core requirements from Fall 2016.

For CSCE 1030 Computer Science I, we will use peer mentors from underrepresented groups to tutor students from those groups. We will also experiment with pair programming.

Progress towards outreach to high school teachers and students

We are offering a 5-week training course to train high school teachers on how to teach the new AP course on computer science principles. A senior student in our Teach North Texas program for training computer science teachers is also taking this.

We offered our BugCatcher debugging competition in various local high schools, so a number of high school students were exposed to programming through the process of debugging erroneous programs.

We participated in the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing program event for our region and offer a scholarship to winners and runners-up of this award.

Progress towards building confidence and community among under-represented students

We have been Bronze Sponsors of both the Grace Hopper and Richard Tapia conferences the last 2 years and will continue to do so. This allows us to send women and other students from underrepresented groups to these conferences.

We strongly support our ACM-W chapter, which supports women through its programs, most notably a book club where books such as Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and Tina Fey's Bossy Pants are discussed by the group.