Virtual Hands-On Workshops to Bring Teenage Girls to Computer Science in Uruguay

During the last decades the presence of women in the area of Computer Science has decreased in most countries. In the last years, at the Facultad de Ingeniería (School of Engineering), Universidad de la República, Uruguay, we have carried out several activities with the goal of bringing girls closer to Computer Science area, on the occasion of Girls in ICT Day. Through these activities, we intend to eliminate certain preconceived ideas and negative stereotypes that promote girls’ distancing from careers of this area. This paper presents the experience of the three virtual workshops carried out during 2021 (in virtual modality, due to the COVID-19 pandemic), which focused on programming, data, and geographic information systems, and the analysis of a set of virtual platforms considered for each workshop

Distancing · Human–computer interaction · Mathematics education · Pandemic · Computer Science · Digital literacy in education · Educational Innovations and Technology · Gender and Technology in Education · Medicine · Psychology