Ready, Set, Code: Computer Science Scholarships and College Prep for Underprivileged Youth.

Our project champions equitable access to computer science education by offering scholarships for a summer 2025 CSCI 111 course at CSU Chico to underprivileged high school juniors and seniors from Chico and Northern California. The course will be enriched with guest lectures from industry professionals, leveraging a successful strategy from my previous interventions at Boston University. At Boston University, I had conducted a weeklong computer science outreach program for underprivileged middle school children and introduced them to game programming using SCRATCH programming language. One of the highlights of this outreach program was the industry guest speakers from National Instruments, Class Central, Drop Box and Toothpike Games. The industry speakers motivated and inspired the middle school children to pursue and take up more of computer science. I hypothesize that by integrating this form in a university curriculum designed specifically for students coming from under privilege and underrepresented background will not only motivate them to complete my unique offering of CSCI 111, but also receive credit for this course from CSU Chico that will give them an advantage to receive credit for a similar course when these students apply at university thus helping in lower their overall tuition. The proposed CSCI 111 summer course at CSU Chico, enriched with industry speaker sessions, offers underrepresented and under privilege high school students a head start in computer science education and college readiness. My proposed offering of CSCI 111 distinguishes from the regular offering of CSCI 111 in that the cohort of students that come in my offering will come from similar backgrounds and can be supportive to each other as they complete my course. My offering of CSCI 111 will be to a smaller cohort of students that is about 10 students where every week I will invite industry or academia guest speakers to come and speak to my students and motivate them. The curriculum is designed for easy adoption because it integrates with existing CSU Chico course of CSCI 111, requiring minimal additional resources or structural changes, which facilitates straightforward implementation and replication across educational settings.