On Designing A 3d Imaging Summer Project For Ontario’s High School Students During Covid-19 Pandemic

During the Covid-19 pandemic, like the vast majority of countries in the world, Canada was under government-mandated lockdown, creating unprecedented challenges for the higher education system. This has exacerbated the problem of gender and ethnic inequalities in the STEM field due to the sudden disappearance of in-person communication and communities that had supported minority groups. To provide emergency support and reduce the known gender / ethnic gap, at York University in Toronto we designed a 3D imaging project for Ontario’s high school (HS) students, as part of an annual summer outreach program in the Lassonde School of Engineering. The project aims to create an equitable opportunity for HS students, providing a comprehensive introduction to image processing through experiential learning. We document our design methodology and experiences in the project, as well as feedback and evaluations from participants at all levels. We believe such documentation is valuable to promote gender- and ethnic-balanced education in image processing and the broader STEM field in the future, in an increasingly unpredictable environment due to climate change.