VOA常速英语:计算机科学领域女性人才层出不穷

Robots that demonstrate Chinese tai chi and breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have launched students like Jane Wu into computer science.

“I think the moment for me was during my freshman robotics elective that I took, called Autonomous Vehicles.And in that class we got to make our own autonomous robots from scratch.”

Harvey Mudd College, with just 800 students, and is part of an educational cluster called The Claremont Colleges,and it stresses engineering.It is also a leader in breaking down barriers to women and computer science which started for one student with an introductory class in computer coding.

“It was a very balanced class.And I think the professors also do a very good job of making sure everyone feels welcome, regardless of their coding ability.”

Women were pioneers in the early days of computers when Grace Hopper, who was later a U.S. Navy rear admiral,helped invent programming languages.

“So she is the original coder.And I think it was only kind of in later decades, the 80s and 90s,that computer games and kind of the idea of computer programming kind of got heavily marketed toward boys rather than girls.”

Now many young women are rediscovering program.

“With coding, I can just have my computer, have some programming language I’m working in,and I can make almost whatever I want.”

Internships in industry are part of the training, student Samantha Andow is heading to Microsoft this summer.

“I’m really excited to see all the problems that computer science is working on right now.”

With all the best and the brightest on the keyboard, regardless of gender.

“We’re not going to get as good solutions, as much progress as we need on the problems facing the world,whether it’s climate change or education, health care.”

But college president Maria Klawe says today’s problems require the creativity that diversity brings.

Mike O’Sullivan, VOA news, Claremont, California.