Animal Tlatoque was a 3-year NSF-funded summer camp offered in 2010, 2011, and 2012. The program conducted summer programs and used art, culture and conservation of animals as a means to interest students in computing. The goal was to attract students who are not already interested in computing.
The external evaluation of this program used observations and program artifacts along with custom-designed questionnaires to show how the program increased middle school female students’ interest in pursuing computer science.
Franklin, D., Conrad, P., Aldana, G. & Hough, S. (2011). Animal tlatoque: Attracting middle-school students to computing through culturally-relevant themes, SIGCSE ’11. Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 453-458. {Animal Tlatoque project]