ISU Profs Receive NSF Grant for Increasing Women and Minorities in Computing

Illinois State University Technology Professor Anu Gokhale and Philosophy Professor Emeritus Kenton Machina are the recipients of a $474,000 three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to increase the number of students, especially women, African-Americans and Hispanics, in computing majors. 

Gokhale and Machina will target a finite mathematics course to encourage students to participate in activities showing how mathematics connects with real-life computing in a wide range of occupations.  They will involve many undergraduate students in entertaining blogs or podcasts that relate mathematics to computing in various academic fields such as accounting, network design, artificial intelligence and industrial control systems.  Computing professionals, including women and under-represented minorities from such fields, will interact with students outside of the classroom, detailing their professional lives and their reliance on mathematics to solve real-life problems.

"We hope the project will result not only in more female and minority students in computing majors, but also more student engagement in finite mathematics as well as better articulation between the mathematics course and computing courses,” said Machina.  “It is also possible that the project will develop more student interest in the Mind Project in cognitive science, also developed with NSF support and deeply connected to computing.”

Gokhale and Machina previously received a NSF grant allowing them to work with a general education course to generate female student interest in science and technology.  Their findings indicated that without intervention, college females were less interested in gaining knowledge about science and technology, became more convinced that science and technology are dangerous to humankind, saw less benefit from science and technology, were less accepting of female participation in science and technology and declined in their perception that females in science and technology have the same level of opportunity as males.  Gokhale’s and Machina’s findings call for interventions in science and technology education similar to those proposed in the new grant in order to keep females, who are nearly 60 percent of the undergraduate population in the U.S., engaged in those fields of study.