I am currently in Tucson, AZ attending the 9th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. This is my third GHC, and it may just be the best one yet. I am really excited that I (1) was able to contribute to this year’s conference proceedings and (2) received an NSF scholarship so I could attend.

This year I participated in both the PhD Forum and the general poster session. For both, the title of my project was “Classroom resources and impact on learning”. If I had to summarize my research questions in one brief phrase, I would say “what does it look like for educational technologies to be used with success?” Computing certainly has come far in the past decade, in that no employer would question the value of computing resources in the work place. But people do question the value of technology in educational settings. The Department of Education in the USA has published reports bringing the use of educational technologies under attack. They feel like if you spend the money and put resources in classrooms, magic should happen, and students should learn more. Unfortunately, learning doesn’t happen by merely being in the presence of great resources - you actually have to use them, and use them well! So far, no one has been able to determine what it means to design and use educational technologies with success and my goal is to shed light on this new frontier.

I have presented my dissertation work at a few other conferences, and I’ve gotten some mixed responses. At traditional CS conferences people seem to say, “yea yea yea, education is great, but what can you tell me about technology design?”. At education conferences people seem to say, “who cares about technology, tell me more about teacher practices.” At Grace Hopper I seem to have found the population who cares about both! Everyone here is a technologist - we want to design technology and design it well. But everyone here has also been put in situations where they are in the minority, the only woman in the room, and we can’t help but question why. Why aren’t their more of us? What can we do to encourage more women to enter our field? Inevitably we turn to education, and therefore put great value in quality education and experiences that foster a desire to learn about mathematics, engineering, and all the technical things we love.

The one thing I regret about this year’s GHC is that I’m not in a position to start applying for jobs! During my poster presentation several women in industry and in academia asked me when I was planning to graduate because they had positions they felt I’d be interested in. It turns out that iRobot has launched a new initiative called SPARK for developing educational materials around AI and Robotics. Microsoft also has an education initiative and is looking for qualified researchers. Also, a professor from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota told me I should apply for one of their tenure track positions that has opened up. I may actually send in an application to some of the professorial positions that were brought to my attention. As my adviser has said, preparing a job application “makes you think” and makes you consider where you are going next. While I may not be quite ready to move on to the next big thing, I’m certainly ready to start thinking about it!