This Year's Grace Hopper Submissions

Tonight is the deadline for the 2013 edition of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing's Call for Participation.  Although I wasn't sure I was going to submit anything this year, I ended up submitting twice! Here are the abstracts...

Gram’s House: Encouraging Girls to Consider Computer Science Through Games

Gail Carmichael, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Carolee Stewart-Gardiner, Kean University, Union, New Jersey
Gillian Smith, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

Computer science still faces a significant gender imbalance with women earning less than 20% of degrees.  To address this issue, we designed an educational computer game, Gram’s House, which aims to teach CS concepts and demonstrate how CS can be used for social good.  We will introduce the game concept, demonstrate two early prototypes, report results of a pilot study, and share our future plans, including procedural content generation.


Academic Presentations Don't Have to be Boring, Honest!

Gail Carmichael, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Terri Oda, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Public speaking is an important part of the academic environment: conference presentations help you communicate your work to others in your field, classroom presentations help you teach, and presentations are often a necessary part of getting and keeping any grant funding.  Unfortunately, it is a skill that few academics spend enough time honing.  This workshop will give attendees a crash course in ways to manage complex technical presentations without putting the audience to sleep, including a variety of styles, practice techniques, and refutation of some of the very bad advice often given to inexperienced academic presenters.  We want to emphasize that oral communication is not the same as written communication, and that in many ways a talk is a story about your research: figuring out that story and how to tell it is a very important part of scientific communication.