Section: Dissemination

Popularization

• Recruiting girls to computer science M. Pupin and T. Rocher are members of the collective Informatique au féminin from University of Lille, which was launched three years ago and whose goal is to organize computer science initiatives that reach teenage girls and female students. Among other actions, they were fully involved in the event L codent, L créent (she codes, she creates). This action aims to teach code to schoolgirls (13-15 years old), before they amass prejudices against computer science. 35 teenage girls were supervised by 9 female graduate computer science students, to create a proximity link between the young women. To emphasize the fact that coding is a creative and innovative pursuit, we chose to teach Processing, a programming language built for visual arts. After eight sessions of creative coding, a public exhibition was organized at the University with inspirational testimonies of women working in the field of computer science. This experiment has been presented at the conference PyParis2017 [30] and at the ACM conference womENcourage2017 [31].

• The team participates to dissemination actions for high school students and high school teachers on a regular basis: multiple presentations on bioinformatics and research in bioinformatics with our dedicated “genome puzzles”, practical session at “Day for Programming and Algorithmic Teaching”, presentations at “Salon de l’étudiant”, visit of high school students in the team (M. Giraud, M. Salson, J.-S. Varré)

• Explaining big data to a general audience: H. Touzet was part of the editorial committee and author for the book “Les big data à découvert”(368 pages).