CSE Prof. Christine Alvarado will be honored in late May at the Summit on Women and IT organized by the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). The summit will take place in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where Alvarado and three former colleagues at Harvey Mudd College will share in NCWIT's Engagement Excellence Award. The annual award recognizes authors whose curricular materials have been submitted to the elite EngageCSEdu collection. Winners must demonstrate excellence in computer-science content and pedagogy while also using research-based engagement practices to make computer science relevant and meaningful for students.
The award highlights the pioneering work that CSE's Alvarado (at right) did at Harvey Mudd prior to joining the UC San Diego faculty in 2012. Her co-winners of the award were fellow computer science faculty Geoff Kuenning, Ran Libeskind-Hadas and Zachary Dodds, all still at Harvey Mudd. "The work I did with my colleagues at HMC was both about rethinking curriculum as well as creating a supportive and relevant structure and community in which students can learn," says Alvarado, noting that the award-winning work is also reflected in various efforts that she has undertaken at UCSD.
Those efforts include the establishment of a curriculum for the new Summer Program for Incoming Students (SPIS). Alvarado and fellow teaching professor Mia Minnes based the SPIS computer science curriculum on Harvey Mudd's CS5. Alvarado notes, "Using CS5 as the backbone for the SPIS CS curriculum was a great way to give students an overview of the big picture of computer science and math, and to show both the real-world relevance of the material and the connections across the ideas that are normally segregated into different classes."
Another effort benefiting from Alvarado's previous experience at HMC is the Early Research Scholars Program, which places first- and second-year CSE students in research apprenticeships with active research projects in CSE. "We are trying to build community between early undergraduates and grad students and faculty," she adds. "This way, students can not only see the relevance of what they are learning in their early courses, but they also form a deeper sense of belonging within CSE."