Workshop to Increase Women’s Enrollment in Technology Discipline at the Community College

Abstract

The enrollment of women in our Engineering Technology program at Queensborough Community College (QCC) is as low as 3 %. The challenge is that while technological change is rapidly expanding opportunities in every discipline today, the number of women entering technical studies remains low. The gender gap in academic technology could be due to the lack of opportunities for female students to be exposed to technology. Accordingly, female students rarely chose technology disciplines as their first choice in academic fields. The opportunity we are suggesting is that we can evoke and boost the women’s interest in technology disciplines thru exposure to cutting-edge technologies including 3D printing and cloud computing. A workshop can be offered where students design a variety of products in CAD software and 3D print them. The workshop also includes exposure to cloud computing and machine learning. Students develop and host a website to chronicle their workshop experiences using HTML, CSS & JavaScript. The workshop exposes students to Design Thinking and leading-edge technologies while building their interest, involvement and personal confidence in technical domains. During the summer of 2018, we offered this practical, technical, project driven workshop and successfully provided technology-learning opportunities to 35 female QCC students.