This year, our chapter had two major community service activities: Take Our Daughters to Work Day and Communiversity Day. Both events were overseen by other offices on campus, but our chapter was involved in creating exciting computing activities for both events.

For Take Our Daughters to Work Day, our chapter organized and ran a workshop for approximately 20 girls (mostly elementary and middle school aged). We taught basic computer modeling and programming using NetLogo (available online at http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo). Even though the workshop was only an hour and fifteen minutes long, the girls were able to learn the basic logo commands and to make several simple programs before they left. Every girl was given a worksheet with the commands and the url of NetLogo (free to download) to encourage them to continue programming when they got home.

Communiversity Day is a new effort at Northwestern where the entire community is invited to campus to see what goes on at a University. Our chapter organized the only effort from the EECS department. We had several hands-on demos of computing research including: virtual peers for children with autism, optics experiments, social network analysis, and computer modeling. As families from the community came to our events we always first asked them what they thought computer scientists did, then we invited them to see our demos and participate in hands-on activities. By the end of the demos most people realized that their conception of computing careers was way off (and that computing is actually a lot of fun!)

In all of our community service events, we aim to reach out and make computing not just accessible but exciting. Many peoples’ view of computing is that it is solitary, boring and hard. As a chapter we are committed to changing this idea and to encouraging more of the community to get involved in computing at all levels. And, we think it is working! The girls that leave our Take Our Daughters to Work workshop are always full of excitement and eager to show their parents their new programs. After Communiversity Day, our group got rave reviews from the participants, many of whom were previously unaware of the full range topics and applications that computer scientists work on.