Outreach

08/22/2024 - AUSTIN (KXAN) — Students heading back to school this semester are entering the classroom with a new tool that experts say could soon be as common as a calculator. “It’s a very useful tool, and students are going to have to know how to use that tool when they should use that tool when they shouldn’t use the tool,” said Greg Durrett, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas in Austin.

08/15/2023 - For the past two decades, The University of Texas at Austin's Computer Science Academies have been at the forefront of providing pre-collegiate computer science education. Starting with the inception of First Bytes, a summer camp aimed at high school women, the program has undergone a remarkable evolution, expanding opportunities to diverse students from across Texas and the United States substantially.

07/17/2020 - Imagine that you are a robot in a hospital: composed of bolts and bits, running on code, and surrounded by humans. It’s your first day on the job, and your task is to help your new human teammates—the hospital’s employees—do their job more effectively and efficiently. Mainly, you’re fetching things. You’ve never met the employees before, and don’t know how they handle their tasks. How do you know when to ask for instructions? At what point does asking too many questions become disruptive?

12/05/2018 - In 2016, Google reported that only six out of ten schools (K-12) offered at least one computer science class. While there continues to be an upward trend in the number of schools offering these classes, many students still lack exposure to programming. Texas Computer Science is changing that.

10/18/2018 - Students at The University of Texas at Austin have a new tool to help them become better informed as voters. BeVote is a free cellphone app designed exclusively for UT students that provides accurate, nonpartisan information and was programmed by UT students.

07/30/2018 - More than just a summer camp for creating memories and making new friends, First Bytes opens up a wide variety of opportunities in computer science for high school girls and helps build a community of women in the tech industry.

02/22/2018 - On Saturday, Women in Computer Science hosted WiCS Hacks, an all-women 12-hour hackathon sponsored by HomeAway, IBM and Bloomberg. This year, the theme of the hackathon was magic and featured categories such as educational technology, community impact, IBM Watson and “magical hacks.” Eighty people attended the event, and the projects were judged by faculty members.

02/01/2017 - "WeTeach CS" enables Texas teachers to teach computer science at a time when only 2 percent of high school grads complete such classes.

09/13/2016 - This afternoon, the White House will hold its Computer Science for All Summit, part of an initiative announced earlier this year to promote computer science learning for American students. The initiative is intended to include more students in computer science, including underrepresented groups of students, especially since job opportunities in the CS field are growing, with 51 percent of all STEM jobs are projected to be in a CS-related field by 2018.

05/04/2016 - Code Orange is a student-led nonprofit. Its goal is to teach young children from underserved communities in Austin not only how to code, but also how to use a variety of technologies. Current leader Moiz Rizvi, a computer science junior, and several of his peers founded Code Orange last September.