(L-R) GameCATS: Michael Eagle, Lane Harrison, Eve Powell

Eve Powell has loved computer gaming as long as she can remember, and she knew long ago that she wanted to learn computer game design in college. There weren’t many opportunities for game enthusiasts at the University of North Carolina- Charlotte (UNCC) when she arrived, so Powell created some. “I got about eight game consoles from my room and set them up in the library,” she said. “Once people showed up and started playing together, it was easy to keep things going.”

Powell was encouraged by Teresa Dahlberg, assistant professor of computer science at UNCC, and by an NSF-funded program called The STARS Alliance (Students & Technology in Academia, Research, and Service). She told her story before a crowd at the fourth Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing, held October 14-17 in Orlando. The UNCC Gamecats have about 60 official members now, and they average about 100 attendees at events. Their purpose is “to get game fans together with programmers and developers and encourage them to start creating new games,” she said.

The Tapia conference showed that the next generation of computer scientists does not have to be, as one speaker put it, “white guys with glasses who talk in a monotone.” Although their total numbers are still small, black and Latino college students studying computer science look pretty much like college students do everywhere — except they might have more fun. Powell said that one of her game club’s members designed a program for people wanted to sketch out custom patterns for hair braiding, mixing the importance of hair to African-American women with a large helping of math. Another student made a program that allows you to sketch out a routine for a break-dancing avatar. And last month, the Gamecats gathered with board games they had designed and played them together, describing the technical problems they had solved to create them.

The STARS Alliance is active on about 20 college campuses in the Southeast, says Jan Cuny, program director for the Broadening Partipating in Computing program at the National Science Foundation. Early, positive experiences with computer research, internships, and mentors encourage students of all sorts to get into computing, she says. STARS forms “leadership corps” on campuses that visit local K-12 classrooms, build community among tech enthusiasts, and encourage undergrads to go all the way to a Ph.D in computer science. UNCC offers full scholarships to a summer program in computing research for undergraduates; the review of applications will begin in February 2008. To apply, contact Karen Bean, kbbean (at) uncc.edu or (704) 687-8380.