STEAM-Powered Education: E-Textiles to Integrate the Arts and STEM

Abstract

he persistently lopsided gender makeup of com-puter and information science programs in US universities and colleges—only 18 percent of engineering school undergraduates in 2009 were women, for instance—suggests that the gender gap in computing education is still obstinately wide. Yet, despite several national initiatives to diversify participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, the underlying culture of computing education remains relatively stagnant, with a curriculum that contin -ues to emphasize areas historically aligned more closely with male interests than women’s, such as robotics, com -puter programming, and physics.