The Chemistry Between High School Students and Computer Science

TL;DR

This paper discusses a 5-year high school outreach program integrating computer science concepts into chemistry classes to increase awareness, revealing positive effects but also highlighting classroom support challenges.

Contribution

It introduces an innovative interdisciplinary outreach approach using interactive worksheets to boost high school students' awareness of computer science.

Findings

Students became more aware of computer science.

Classroom support issues hindered implementation.

The approach showed potential for increasing interest.

Abstract

Computer science enrollments have started to rise again, but the percentage of women undergraduates in computer science is still low. Some studies indicate this might be due to a lack of awareness of computer science at the high school level. We present our experiences running a 5-year, high school outreach program that introduces information about computer science within the context of required chemistry courses. We developed interactive worksheets using Molecular Workbench that help the students learn chemistry and computer science concepts related to relevant events such as the gulf oil spill. Our evaluation of the effectiveness of this approach indicates that the students do become more aware of computer science as a discipline, but system support issues in the classroom can make the approach difficult for teachers and discouraging for the students.