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Underrepresented middle school girls: on the path to computer science through paper prototyping

The computing profession is lacking representation that mirrors the fabric of society in the United States. Most studies show a low percentage of participation for women and minority groups. In this paper, we present our experiences conducting a week-long Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) workshop with underrepresented middle school girls. Our description is focused on an activity where girls created a paper prototype for a chat application. We present qualitative results showing characteristics of the prototypes built, and discuss the participant responses to a few of the questions in an interview at the end of the week. Our results reveal that paper prototyping can be used as a motivator for a career path in computer science. In spite of the negative stereotypes that the underrepresented females had prior to the intervention, the HCI workshop revealed a user-centric component of computer science that gave participants a positive perception of the discipline.