Ripple Effects: Increasing the Diversity of Creators and Consumers of Computing Technology

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Notes by Moya Watson

Panelists from Carnegie Mellon introduced their projects that aim to increase "diversity beyond gender" (mainly ethnic and economic). "Successful companies are those that pay attention to their diverse organizations;" "Diversity is a byproduct of finding good solutions."

The aim is to work with communities that are technologically underserved, both to create technology that will help to eliminate poverty and increase the diversity of people in these non-traditional opportunities.

Developing communities report two big needs:

  • Health
  • Education

For education, goals are to explore technology's role in developing the communities as well as to enhance education by teaching technology and providing tools for teaching.

Need to "increase diversity of the producers and the consumers of technology."

One panelist described a project at a university in Ghana in which students participated in building, designing, implementing, and debugging robots out of local materials and with a limited budget. The increase in student confidence was one of the most important outcomes of this project.

Additional notes by Eva Shon

PDF about the panel

TechBridgeWorld @ CMU is an organization that aims to advance technology in sustainable development as described above. To reiterate, the goals of their education initiative are:

  1. to enhance technology education in developing communities
  2. to develop and provide the technology tools that enable greater access to education (such as tools that improve literacy and math)

They do this via projects, courses, seminars, internships, independent studies. Courses provide a framework that helps students develop tech consulting skills and people skills, broadens student interests, and teaches the praxis of using technology to serve others in real communities and the non-profit sector, not just gearing students for industry as many CS programs do.

Course descriptions

Undergraduate:

  • CSE undergraduates - prequisite: 3rd or 4th years, satisfies "other CS req", CS, IS, ECE
  • each student partnered one-on-one with director or tech coordinator in non-profit
  • 3 hrs per week off campus required
  • wide variety of organizations: shelters, food pantries, rape counseling centers, libraries, after-school programs

Some goals of the course:

  • provides a complex technical environment & is about identifying real-world problem areas
  • how to bring structure to unstructured problems
  • writing sills
  • communicating tech ideas to non-technical people
  • relevance of CS to world

Examples: Karen - developed a telelconferencing solution for teaching American Sign Language remotely Nayema - designed a web building project for kids in an afterschool program

Graduate:

Technology for Developing Communities

  • graduate course, software research or robotics, diverse interdiscplinary faculty
  • all required to do a half-semster project - often based on actual techbridgeworld projects
  • simulated projects were also offered this semester - run students through a simulation what it's like to do a real-world project, for

eg. if a typhoon hit a developing country - how to respond?

Summer Program:

  • go abroad for 10 weeks
  • tech consulting in global context
  • project sites range from the Cook Islands, Palau, Sri Lanka, Ghana, South America, etc.
  • program picks up travel costs, but local sponsors provide food, housing, local transportation
  • good gender balance
  • eg. Marshal Island - a community called Ebeye - only 4 hours of power available a day - improved computing network infrastructure in their hospital and provided technical raining

V-Unit:

  • V-Unit @ CMU
  • graduate student elective - can get program credit
  • technology for non-tradational applicaitons
  • students talk to local orgs think of idea, their V-Unit Coordinator advises about logistics, time-frame, etc.
  • other students can sustain project for upcoming years

Project Examples:

Intelligent Tutor to Teach American Sign Language:

  • many deaf children have limited opportunities to practice sign language at home because their family members don't know ASL
  • as a result many deaf high school students have a 4th grade reading level
  • Western Pennsylvania School for the deaf - spoke with a teacher there, refined ideas for project
  • researched limitations of existing tools:
    • most tools are only for beginners
    • ASL dictionaries are not complete and have shallow definitions
  • tool developed used an at-home/gaming interface to make it more fun to inspire use outside of the classroom
  • tool included lessons, games, an inteligent tutor that gets harder depending on how the student is doing with adaptive learning algorithms

Robotics Education in Ghana:

  • hands-on robotics course taught at Ashesi Univ.
  • goal to increase creators and consumers of technology
  • addressed not only limited access to infrastrucutre but also limited access to expertise
  • solution was a creative course design, encouraging tech creativity and exposure to breadth of issues in CS
  • designing, building and debugging robots completely out of local materials
  • outcomes: increase in student confidence, technical skills, awareness, excitement because of positive community response

Project Kane for literacy:

  • Ghana: illiteracy still a big problem
  • due to limited opportunities for guided reading practice outside of school eg. not a part of family life, parents are not literate
  • schools cannot offer each child one-on-one attention
  • Kane - automated reading tutor software in English with voice recognition
  • pilot study - worked w/ accents of children in Ghana - Phase 2 planned for Oct '06

Adaptive Braille Writing Tutor:

  • student-led project now expanding to a TechBridgeWorld project
  • 2 robotics Ph.D. students
  • tech solution for students learning to write braille based on statistic methods and current tools
  • over 90% of the blind are living in developing communities
  • only 3% is literate
  • traditional methods for learning braille are expensive: stylus, slate, punching holes, must learn both forwards and backwards
  • few teachers in developing communities to teach braille
  • collaboration for Mathru school for the Blind in Bangalore
  • successful 6 week-long field test in both Pittsburgh and Bangalore over summer of 2006
  • low-cost, robust, computer/PDA interface
  • 3-4 activities catered to different grade-levels
  • future directions:
    • battery powered devices
    • independent of computer hook up
    • software that adapts to the skill level of a user

Future Directions:

  • they want feedback on our interest in these programs and other examples in this field
  • increased diversity of students & faculty advsiors - gender, nationality, ethnicity, academic background, peace corp volunteers, variety of departments for faculty advisors
  • they want to expand the number of partners
  • increase diversity of consumers - NGOs, universities, government ministries, different age groups (children to adults)
  • expanding geographic reach, to Middle East and East Africa in next couple years

Masters student at robotics institute at CMU - her motivation: As an engineer - application of technology in developing context is a growing area and brings in many other non-traditional reasearch areas. This gives rise to different kinds of problems - and greater collaboration with people to apply science to the needs of humanity.

Discussion:

Question about problem of how research gets dropped once grad students move on. Sustainable model?

Technology for Developing Communities course:

  • first few classes were about how technology has failed, sensitive to the needs of sustainability
  • focus on participatory design
  • VUnits became an on-going project - with community partners committed to sustaining them - model of TechBridgeWorld

What are students reaction to the simulated project?

  • initial reaction at this time is "deer in the headlights"
  • still have yet to see results since it is going on right now

Has anyone else done work in this area?

Response from a 1st year MS student in robotics at MIT 2 projects:

  • Africa Technology Initiative - taught in Kenya - started by students from Kenya at MIT
    • students go to Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia and teach a 6-week course in Java and entrepreneurial software engineering
    • makes them competitive in job market, even globally
  • Israel - taught Palestinian & Israeli high school students within a conflict resolution model
    • taught Java - students who are supposed to hate each other come together to learn and work on a project together
    • establish good business and technical partnerships

Any collaborations with other universities?

  • Wary of growing too big too soon - might fall flat
  • Model is to do smaller things and learn from mistakes as we go
  • Have done several projects for 2 years, now ready to start partnering with other universities
  • any models of how to collaborate?
  • need to find a model that works first

from Sally Ride's talk: "How to stay globally competetive?" But how about being globally collaborative instead?

Links:

TechBridgeWorld

V-Unit @ CMU

ICTD 2006

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