BPCnet Activity Library

AccessComputing staff members work with hundreds of students with disabilities. Many capable participants are looking for internship opportunities.

AccessComputing helps students with disabilities successfully pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in computing fields. Students who join the AccessComputing Team participate in an online mentoring community and are eligible to request funding for conference travel, tutoring, and internships.

The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is an introductory computer science curriculum for high school or college students. BJC emphasizes the joy and complexity of creating visual computer programs and applications, balanced with critical reflection on the impacts of new computing technology. BJC is an AP CS Principles course supported by the NSF and endorsed by the College Board and code.org.

Capacity building institutes (CBI) bring people together to collaboratively identify solutions to specific problems. Participants may come from across disciplines, departments, and/or institutions. AccessComputing project has worked with universities to organize CBIs that bring together individuals on their campuses to identify, implement, and institutionalize policies, practices, and procedures.

Hackathons focusing on the accessibility of IT for people with disabilities can be used to introduce computing students and professionals to accessibility issues and solutions and increase their awareness about the need for making technologies that they design accessible to a broad audience that includes people with disabilities.

Ensure your lab and/or department website, videos, and documents are accessible to students with disabilities.

The Data Buddies Project conducts systematic evaluation of programs, tracks career paths and outcomes of students, and reports on the state of the computing research talend pool available to the wider community. This project collects its data via the Data Buddies Survey (DBS), is a tool distributed to collect national data on computing students.

A self-guided course that faculty and administrators can complete either individually or as a department to hone in on what they can do at their institutions to recruit and/or retain students. The course includes videos, slide decks, and good social science research related to BPC and can be completed in pieces or modules.

Extension Services (ES) partners with academic departments of computing to provide a two-year customized consultation model to increase women’s participation in undergraduate programs. Using a research-based systemic change model, ES consultants work with departmental committees to develop and implement a strategic recruitment and retention plan producing measurable short- and long-term results.

Provides a research-based method for finding, fixing, and averting gender bias "bugs" in your department website, course portals, scholarship application forms, software user interfaces, informational flyers, and other online and offline user-facing designs. Helps decrease failures and other poor experiences members of minoritized genders have when they interact with technology and information.

The NCWIT AspireIT program peer-lead computing education for K-12 girls, powered by NCWIT, is designed to teach K-12 girls programming fundamentals and computational thinking in fun, creative, and hands-on environments. AspireIT participants are ultimately encouraged to contribute their unique perspectives and ideas to future innovations.

Hosting a panel of students with disabilities is a great way to help faculty, staff, or other stakeholders learn more about the issues that students with disabilities face in postsecondary education. These panels can be held as part of a larger workshop on disability, as a standalone meeting, or as a part of a regularly-held departmental meeting.

TECHNOLOchicas is a national initiative of the NCWIT and Televisa Foundation designed to raise awareness among young Latinas and their families about careers in technology. TECHNOLOchicas uses the powerful stories of Latinas from diverse backgrounds who are in technology fields and recognize the power of innovation to change the world. CISE PIs are invited to host a TECHNOLOchicas event.

Active learning pedagogies, such as Peer Instruction, have been shown to be better for all students and additionally beneficial for students who are from groups underrepresented in computing. Curricular materials, how to guides, and other support for faculty are available at http://peerinstruction4cs.org/

A blog post for those newer to the idea of Broadening Participation in Computing and why it’s important. This post addresses the factors that contribute to the underrepresentation of some groups of people and shares actionable steps that individuals can take to move the field forward.

Consider how you can develop and deliver courses that are inclusive of students with a wide variety of disabilities and other characteristics by utilizing frameworks like universal design of instruction.

A free, online certificate course to (1) train department IT staff, faculty, students, and anyone else to find, fix, and avert gender biases in their user-facing designs; and (2) train educators how to teach these topics to their students.

AccessComputing is an NSF Broadening Participation Alliance that works to increase the participation of people with disabilities in computing education and careers. AccessComputing partners work together to make computing courses, resources, programs, and/or project activities more welcoming and accessible to individuals with disabilities.

Climate surveys are a great way to gauge the experiences of diverse groups in your department or organization. Be sure to ask about disability in such a survey.

EngageCSEdu helps broaden participation in computing by empowering faculty to improve curriculum and pedagogy in introductory courses so that ALL students are engaged, feel included, and are part of an inclusive student culture. It includes a living collection of peer-reviewed introductory CS course materials and an Engagement Practices Framework.

In these standards-aligned lessons, students form their own questions about the world around them, analyze data using multiple statistical methods and introductory programming, and write a research paper about their findings. Designed with flexibility in mind, Bootstrap:Data Science can be taught as a standalone Data Science class, or can be integrated into mainstream math, social studies, business, health, and history classes - as well as the standard CS course.

The NCWIT Collegiate Award honors technical projects that demonstrate high creativity and potential societal impact. Mentoring students to apply for this award offers those students guidance to accomplish a challenging project, the reinforcement of individual encouragement, and the chance to receive high-profile recognition. These benefits can help to retain underrepresented students.

CAHSI’s signature practices, knowledge, and experience can be leveraged as a resource for other institutions/departments seeking to build or strengthen in any of these areas: Pedagogical practices, inclusive environments, research capacity building, support structures, and strategies for working with K-12 organizations/community/industry.

The purpose of the CSPD toolkit is to train CS students, professionals or faculty to lead CS activities with children and young people. The toolkit provides training resources and videos illustrating best practices in out-of-school time learning.

The CRA-WP Grad Cohort Workshop for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Leadership Skills (IDEALS) aims to widen the participation, access, opportunities, and experience of individuals in computing research by building and mentoring nationwide communities through their graduate studies.

Students apply mathematical concepts and rigorous programming to creating a video game, through a series of standards-aligned lessons (both math & CS standards). Lessons can be taught as a separate, standalone CS class, or can be integrated into a mainstream math class, delivered by a math teacher with no prior CS experience. Students have shown improvement on standard, pencil-and-paper math tasks.

Resources for educators and technical trainers to teach gender-inclusive technology design concepts to their computer science, CS, engineering, IT, or other students. Educators can also use the resources to find & fix gender bias bugs in their courseware (e.g., Blackboard/Canvas pages, assignments, syllabi, learning widgets). GenderMag-Teach is part of The GenderMag Project (https://gendermag.org)

Offer a workshop, camp, or after school program to introduce students with disabilities to computer science.

The CRA-WP Grad Cohort Workshop for Women aims to increase the ranks of senior women in computing-related studies and research by building and mentoring nationwide communities of women through their graduate studies.

DREU matches promising undergraduate students from underrepresented groups with a faculty mentor for a summer research experience at the faculty mentor's institution, with an objective to increase the number of people from underrepresented groups (i.e. women, minorities, persons with disabilities) who are enrolled in graduate studies in the fields of computer science and computer engineering.

Housed at Northeastern’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences, the Center for Inclusive Computing seeks to substantially increase the national representation of women majoring in computing. Launched in 2019, we award funding to colleges and universities to scale best practices known to increase the representation of women in undergraduate computing.