Luís Felipe Costa, a former student at Instituto Superior Técnico, received the Educational Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computational Science Education. The prize was awarded by ACM SIGHPC, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing, on 28 September in Atlanta, United States of America.
The award recognises Luís Felipe Costa’s work in teaching computer science applied to education, particularly his doctoral thesis, ‘Heroine’s Learning Journey’.
The model proposed in the thesis, co-supervised by Ana Moura Santos, to promote gender equality in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields and support girls who wish to pursue a career in this area, has already been successfully applied in the context of the Erasmus+ Fostering Women to STEM MOOCs (FOSTWOM) for gender equality in STEM fields.
In FOSTWOM, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were used to develop STEM content free of gender stereotypes, with the aim of increasing the number of female students and graduates in STEM fields. This includes female students enrolled in higher education institutions and those participating in STEM MOOC courses.