Alice, middle schoolers & the imaginary worlds camps

Research indicates that (i) many women who take CS1 feel less experienced than (and therefore at a disadvantage to) their male counterparts at computer programming, and that (ii) by the time they reach high school, many young women view computing as "geeky" and "for nerds." This paper describes our Imaginary Worlds Camps -- a summer program in which we use Carnegie Mellon's Alice software to address these problems before students reach high school. The preliminary results are quite encouraging.