Empowering minorities to help minorities: the Puerto Rico Online Educational Software Initiative

Computing continues to be accessible only to a small minority of the citizens of the world. Even when considering computer use in the USA alone, minorities and low-income families do not have the access to the computing resources that other groups have. The situation is much worse in other countries. This has significant and serious (negative) effects on the educational development of minority and low-income groups. In the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus, the author has initiated a project to try to address some of this issues in a subtle but hopefully effective way. In an effort to provide localized solutions to the educational software market in Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rico Online Educational Software Initiative (PROESI) is being created with support from NSF and UPRM. The goals of this initiative are briefly outlined. The desired outcome of this effort is to empower the constituents of the Puerto Rico educational system to provide solutions to their own problems by taking advantage of the WWW and the resources available at the University. Furthermore, this preactivity towards computing needs should help stimulate more minorities (in this case Puerto Ricans) to follow science and engineering careers as they will feel part of the "information economy".