Resumen de Making the computing professional domain more attractive: an outreach program for prospective students
B. Haberman, C. Yehezkel, H. Salzer
The recent rapid development of the field of computing has posed challenges in educating newcomers, in particular, in attempting to bridge the gap between school and the contemporary world of computing. To meet this challenge, we developed a novel outreach program for prospective high-school students aimed at exposing them ``directly by leading experts'' to state-of-the-art computing research and development. The program includes enrichment meetings and software development projects under the supervision of experts. Six hundred students participated the last four years in enrichment activities; 86 of these students developed high-level software projects. A long-term formative evaluation of the outreach program has been conducted. So far, the study's findings have indicated that the program contributes to developing a culture of learning befitting the dynamic world of industrial computing, thus providing the students with an entry point into the computing community of practice.
