On Wednesday, June 8, 2022, TCNJ’s Department of Computer Science (CS) hosted 26 students and 5 teachers from two nearby school districts, Hamilton Township School District (HTSD) and Mercer County Technical Schools (MCTS), to stimulate interest in computing research and careers in the field of artificial intelligence. CS faculty member Dr. Sejong Yoon led the event, titled “Summer Workshop on AI: Special Topic on Humans, Crowd, Environment, and Robotics.” The program offered students opportunities to take part in various activities, including visits to the CS Department research lab, participation in virtual reality-based research experiments, and multiple coding sessions using the Python programming language. The program also aims to broaden the participation in computing for underrepresented minorities in the field of computing.
Dr. Yoon organized the event in collaboration with the participating school districts, as well as faculty members from Rutgers University’s Department of Computer Science (Professor Vladimir Pavlovic and Professor Mubbasir Kapadia) and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Professor Jorge Ortiz), and TCNJ’s Department of Educational Administration and Secondary Education (Professor Karen Gordon). The workshop was the second offering of a four-year series (2021-2024), supported by National Science Foundation Grant #1955365.