Jan Plane Featured in Diamondback Article

Jan Plane, director of the Maryland Center for Women in Computing, which is supported in part by UMIACS, was featured in the UMD Diamondback student newspaper in an article about the Bethesda chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association's (AFCEA) recent $425,000 gift to the university to support engineering and computer science education.

A portion of the AFCEA funding will support Computer Science Connect, a summer camp and monthly weekend school-year program for middle school girls designed to catalyze a love of computing for students through hands-on, experiential learning activities.

Plane, who serves as director of the program, says she started Computer Science Connect as a chance to introduce female middle schoolers to computer science and show how it can apply to their other interests.

"Research shows that in elementary school, the distribution of people interested in STEM is even across genders and across ethnic groups, but by the time they get to high school, it’s not," she says.

Read more here.