The National Science Foundation (NSF) is betting it will. Recently the NSF awarded a $355,000, two-year grant to Ralph Morelli, a Trinity College professor of computer science, to prove it.

Morelli is now working to develop a collaborative program, joining undergraduate computer science students, social service agencies, and other IT professionals to come up with open source software solutions to such real-world problems as coordinating relief efforts for earthquakes and tracking vital medical records for AIDS patients in Africa.  While Trinity is the lead institution on the initiative, Connecticut College and Wesleyan University also have been awarded separate, supporting grants.

The program is to serve as a model that may be replicated nationally; its goal is to pump up anemic undergraduate interest in computer education, especially among young women, a population traditionally underrepresented in the field.    

Morelli hopes the emphasis on humanitarian issues will tap into the community service interest on college campuses and eliminate the misconception that computer education involves only learning programming languages such as Java.

“We want to show them directly that computing is all about problem-solving and design and helping real people solve important social problems,” he said.

At Trinity, Morelli will work on the project with Project Director Trishan de Lanerolle; Heidi J.C. Ellis, a visiting assistant professor of computer science; Joe Barber, director of community service and civic engagement; and Carlos Espinosa, director of the College’s Trinfo Café. Collaborators will include professors Danny Krizanc and Norman Danner from Wesleyan University and Gary Parker and Ozgur Izmirli from Connecticut College. The combined grant amount for all three colleges is $496,429 and was made by the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate of NSF in the program, Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education.

Already this summer, with the support of a $17,500 grant from the Aidmatrix Foundation, a group of five Trinity and Connecticut College students are working on two international open source projects and have developed important modules for both:  

• Sahana, a Sri Lanka-based disaster recovery IT system that was developed following the 2004 Asian Tsunami, and
• OpenMRS, a Rwanda-based medical record system that is currently deployed in several poor African communities.