In February 2010, the Center for Women and Information Technology (CWIT) held its first Bits & Bytes I.T. and Engineering Design Competition for high school juniors since 2007. Twenty academically talented young women were invited to an overnight visit at UMBC and were hosted by the CWIT Scholars in CWIT's living-learning community. The program supports CWIT's mission to encourage and support women to be leaders in Engineering and Information Technology fields.

The I.T. design competition used the Alice 3D authoring environment, which allows students to create, animate, and interact with 3D, computer-generated scenes. Students worked in teams to design a storybook tale with various interactions, scenes, animated characters, and other features. The Snap, Crackle, Pop Engineering design competition required the teams to use common household items to design a mechanism to sort different types of cereal of all shapes, sizes, and weights while minimizing cost and maximizing efficiency. For each of the design competitions, the teams' designs were judged by a group of judges, including a UMBC faculty member, industry professional, and a current CWIT student in the field. Teams were chosen for awards for their design, and technical and creative achievement.

Students came from high schools across Maryland and Virginia and enjoyed getting to know each other during the program through teambuilding activities and the team design competition. They also had the chance to meet with representatives from the different I.T. and engineering departments at UMBC. On Monday afternoon, students had the opportunity to tour the Imaging Research Center (IRC), receieved a tour of the UMBC campus, and had the opportuntiy to speak with a diverse group of CWIT Scholars.

Look in CWIT's Spring 2010 Newsletter for more about 2010's event. See the Bits & Bytes 2010 group picture.