This article is published in the October 2024 issue.

Carla Brodley to Speak at Upcoming BPC Community Forum: Identifying and Removing Institutional Barriers to BPC


By Andres Purpuro, Program Assistant, CERP

Join us for the next BPCnet.org BPC Community Forum on Friday, November 1, at noon EST, for a discussion led by Carla Brodley, Executive Director, and Catherine Gill, Program Director, of the Center for Inclusive Computing (CIC). They will explore strategies to overcome institutional barriers in undergraduate computing programs.

CIC partners with universities to identify and remove the—often unintentional—barriers that prevent students from discovering and thriving in computing education. To remove these barriers, CIC Partner Schools implement evidence-based, systemic, and sustainable interventions that don’t require ongoing funding. The CIC works in partnership with 100+ universities across the country to ensure that students of any intersectional demographic identity can discover, thrive, and persist in computing. 

In this talk, the CIC will explore the most common institutional barriers found in undergraduate computing programs and the concrete actions that can be taken to remove these barriers such as handling the distribution of prior computing experience in the intro sequence, rethinking the placement of math requirements, creating interdisciplinary computing BS/BA degrees, ensuring that multi-section courses use common assessment and more. The CIC will present results for the 21 partner schools who have had 2+ years to implement changes. 

The presenters and the BPCnet.org team look forward to sharing this information with the BPC community and hope to receive feedback on what systemic interventions might be missing from this list. 

Registration is required to attend this Zoom event. After registering with your name and email address, you will receive an email confirmation with the Zoom link. 

The live transcript will be turned on for this BPCnet Community Forum. If you have any accessibility needs, please reach out to bpcinfo@cra.org.