Computing for All at Cal Poly SLO

With more than $430,000 in new grants, Cal Poly plans to introduce computing to more students campus-wide, which is expected to add needed diversity to computer science courses.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Cal Poly’s College of Engineering, along with other community colleges and universities, a total of $1.55 million for what will be a collaborative effort.

One grant, from the NSF program Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Computing in Undergraduate Education (IUSE: CUE), will help develop and pilot a Computing for All course sequence at Cal Poly, the lead campus, and its partner institutions, which include UC Santa Barbara, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and the College of Charleston. The proposal is designed for students who traditionally do not take computing coursework in college.

“The basic idea is to create a new course that would allow for broad participation in computation from across campus,” said Bruce DeBruhl, an assistant professor in Cal Poly’s Computer Science and Software Engineering Department (CSSE). “There will be a little programming, but it’s primarily not a programming class.”