Bringing More Girls to STEM: Initiatives within the Frontiers in Education Conference

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) courses are male-dominated spaces where women are the minority most of the time. Even now, when women are the majority in universities, the computer science and engineering degrees are still uneven when it comes to gender. There have been interesting initiatives in the past Frontiers In Education (FIE) conferences about several of the issues related to bringing more girls into the computer science and engineering fields of study. Some of these works typically address one or more challenges associated with increasing the number of women in computer science and engineering by using different approaches and targeting different age groups. The majority of the studied works focus on raising awareness through the development of boot camps, workshops, programs and other initiatives. Other works investigate the attitude towards computing careers and the lack of interest in these areas by female students, regardless of age. There are also works that are focused on female student's retention and success in their academic degrees. All of the reviewed works have one major goal in common: bringing more girls into STEM fields, such as engineering and computer science. In order to achieve this goal, the existing initiatives employ disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. Although the majority of the work's main technical focus is on teaching programming, this is achieved by using a variety of approaches and resources. For example, there are works aimed at developing digital games, approaches that use robotics with Arduino and also approaches that integrate computer programming with musical instruments, among others. We did not find a study that aggregated and analyzed these initiatives. The main goal of this paper is to analyze past FIE editions to identify and aggregate studies related to attracting girls to STEM areas. The method was based on systematic review procedures considering FIE 2010 thru FIE 2022. We analyze and evaluate the existing works based on their objectives, learning topics, target group information, and availability of supplementary materials. The main contribution of this paper is to present a critical literature review on this important subject that was performed using all the related articles published in the past Frontiers in Education Conferences.