StitchFest: Diversifying a College Hackathon to Broaden Participation and Perceptions in Computing

While coding competitions and hackathons have steadily increased in number, few women participate. Because these public events present viable opportunities to broaden participation in computing, we designed the theme to focus on “Wear & Care” and collaborative arrangements in a hardware hackathon, called StitchFest, in which 33 undergraduate and graduate students used the LilyPad Arduino to design wearables. Our analysis focused on the interviews conducted with eight female and seven male college participants to understand how targeted recruitment, thematic framing, space arrangements, kinds of materials and material distribution impacted participation and perception. We discuss what we learned about setting a thematic focus and fostering collaborative learning in coding competitions for broadening participation in computing.

StitchFest: Diversifying a College Hackathon to Broaden Participation and Perceptions in Computing

  • Author Richard, Gabriela T.; Kafai, Yasmin B.; Adleberg, Barrie; Telhan, Orkan
  • Publication Title Proceedings Of The 46Th ACM Technical Symposium On Computer Science Education
  • Publication Year 2015
  • BPC Focus Gender
  • Methodology Qualitative
  • Analytic Method NA
  • Institution Type NA
  • DOI 10.1145/2676723.2677310
  • URL https://doi.org/10.1145/2676723.2677310