Teaching Science at Public High Schools
Helping Patients Cope with Complexities
Geological Approaches to Diverse Questions
Bryn Mawr to Co-Host Microsoft Robotics Institute
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Bryn Mawr to Co-Host Microsoft Robotics Institute
Women have long been a tough crowd for computer science — difficult to attract to the discipline, difficult to retain once enrolled. But Bryn Mawr's Computer Science Program has a remarkable record of success using innovative teaching approaches to welcome women into the digital fold. That record, combined with an award-winning instructional-robotics software platform developed at Bryn Mawr, has attracted the attention of Microsoft Corp. The software giant has awarded Bryn Mawr and a partner institution, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the stewardship of a new Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE).
Funded by a $1 million Microsoft grant that will be matched by the two host institutions, IPRE aims to broaden the appeal of computer science — a discipline that has been steadily losing majors in U.S. colleges and universities for the last five years — by introducing robotics into the discipline's core curriculum. Researchers at Bryn Mawr and Georgia Tech will be developing an introductory computer-science course that teaches basic lessons in the discipline with real robots.
Three years from now, IPRE plans to offer a Computer Science 101 textbook that comes packaged with a small, simple robot. Georgia Tech is responsible for developing the hardware; Bryn Mawr is responsible for creating the software that students will use to program the robots. The curriculum's effectiveness will be tested at a diverse group of institutions: Georgia Tech's College of Computing, Bryn Mawr, the University of Georgia and Georgia State University .
Pyromania
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Douglas Blank |
The software will be a new version of Pyro, a versatile robotics platform created by Associate Professor of Computer Science Douglas Blank and developed, with the aid of a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, by a team including Blank, Professor of Computer Science Deepak Kumar, and colleagues at Swarthmore and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Pyro, because it is adapted to several different kinds of robots, significantly reduced the time investment necessary to work with robots and made robotics accessible to undergraduates.
"Pyro allows students to jump right in and begin exploring problems in robotics," Blank says. The new version, tentatively dubbed "Myro," will be integrated with Microsoft's new Robotics Studio.
Eight colleges and universities described by Microsoft as "leading U.S. schools with strong track records in educational robotics" were invited to submit proposals to host the institute. Bryn Mawr was the only liberal-arts college in the group, which otherwise comprised large research universities and polytechnic institutes. Stewart Tansley, program manager in External Research and Programs at Microsoft Research, explained that the invitation was tendered to Bryn Mawr because of its role in developing Pyro, which he characterizes as "perhaps the leading educational robotics platform today," and the College's "status as an innovative liberal-arts institution teaching computing science in novel ways."
Reversing a Trend
Novel approaches are in order because of the precipitous decline in the number of computer-science majors in U.S. institutions. Policymakers and high-tech industry leaders have noted this trend with alarm. The discipline appears to be especially unwelcoming to women and minorities — it is, for instance, the only discipline in the sciences and engineering in which the number of female students has declined since 1983.
"IPRE hopes to help reverse this trend," says Blank.
The IPRE partners hope an introductory course that offers the opportunity to program a personal robot will arouse students' interest and stir their imaginations. The prospect of working with a robot might help motivate students who might not otherwise be attracted to a discipline that is often seen as the preserve of the "nerd" demographic. It might also help retain students who are uninspired by the abstraction of computer code.
The discipline — and the world of technology — has much to gain by incorporating a wider range of perspectives, says Kumar. The Bryn Mawr program has long been committed to exploring alternatives to standard teaching methods that appear to discourage women from entering the field.
Unique Perspective
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Deepak Kumar |
"Bryn Mawr's involvement in the IPRE partnership introduces the ideas and problems in artificial intelligence and robotics to a very different set of students from the traditional engineering types that have worked on those problems over the past 50 years," says Kumar. "As a result, I think we will see some very different and amazing solutions to these kinds of problems."
The Bryn Mawr program's pedagogical philosophy springs from its unusual understanding of the discipline itself as a liberal-arts field, Blank and Kumar say.
"We see computer science as a way of asking and attempting to answer some of the big questions that are really at the heart of a liberal-arts degree, be it in French, physics or philosophy. Big questions such as: Who are we? Where have we come from? What is consciousness?" Blank explains.
This approach tends to attract students with diverse academic inclinations, Blank and Kumar say — not just those drawn to mathematics and engineering, but those who gravitate toward natural sciences and even humanities.
Claudia N. Ginanni '86 is the College's Web content manager. She edits its online weekly news publication, Bryn Mawr Now, as well as the monthly Bryn Mawr E-News, which is distributed via e-mail to alumnae/i and parents of current students.