Technology is usually considered a hyper-specialized field in education. It is usually considered unnecessary to inject advanced technological study anywhere it has not been certified as indispensable. But as the “high” in high tech inches even higher by the day, some say we need greater democratization of tech education to produce citizens and employees with skills to match.

Suzanne Matthews, assistant professor of Computer Science at US Military Academy, spoke about her experiences raising the bar for her students. “All of our students are also active duty military, so given that, we are not a very research focused institution,” she told co-host Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

“However, one of my big goals as a faculty member is to introduce students to research so that they have opportunities to go to graduate school and further their own interests. And the way I’ve done that at West Point is to really introduce them to parallel computing,” she said.

Matthews said that her students have gone on to win scholarships and awards for their technology skills.

Core(s) curriculum

Matthews explained that parallel computing executes tasks simultaneously using either multiple cores or large distributed network systems. Cutting-edge computing or the future of computing, it may be said, is parallel computing.

She believes there ought to be greater opportunities for students to learn about this technology beyond her own institution. “I also do a lot of work with CSinParallel, which is an NSF-funded organization that tries to inject more parallelism at the undergraduate level,” she said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Anita Borg Institute’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

Photo by SiliconANGLE