Computing camps for girls – a first-time experience at the university of Limerick

Abstract

Increasing the number of females in ICT-related university courses has been a major concern for several years. In 2015, we offered a girls-only computing summer camp for the first time, as a new component in our education and outreach activities to foster students’ interest in our discipline. In this paper, we describe the motivation for the camp and how we designed the program, and we report our experiences and survey findings from the first two editions of the camp. They can provide guidance for planning further events targeting females, and help to integrate awareness about underrepresentation of females in other activities.