U.S. Is Becoming More Diverse, But Is The Online Population?; NPR, 1/20/14

NPR; U.S. Is Becoming More Diverse, But Is The Online Population? :

"According to a National Science Foundation study, only five percent of scientists and engineers in the U.S. are African-American. Host Michel Martin speaks with Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County about the challenges blacks face in the tech world. They're joined by Silicon Valley techie Ayori Selassie and digital lifestyle expert Mario Armstrong. This segment originally aired Nov. 27, 2013 on Tell Me More."...

MARTIN: Your tour is called Dream, Create, Go! - what do you see as the biggest challenge facing black students in particular? We're focusing on that today.

ARMSTRONG: You know what's interesting? I see this huge appetite. Kids want to go into these fields. The problem that I see quite often is that there's a disconnect between connecting why they should pursue these fields and their passions. In other words, a lot of times, I see people wanting to push technology down kids throats and get them to try to fulfill these pipeline issues. Where I think if you take a different approach, which we do on our show, is we try to find out what are kids' passions?And how do we tie - I call it STEAM 'cause we do add arts into this - STEAM - how do we tie that to their passions? Thereby giving them relevancy to wanting to learn math. If you want to become a video game programmer, you cannot do that if you don't understand trigonometry, geometry and the basics of laws of physics. So if you can tap into a child's passion, then you peel back the layers and find out what the STEM or STEAM is in those passions.

MARTIN: Ayori, what about you? As we mentioned, you're based in San Francisco and you help aspiring tech entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to experts. What do you see as - why aren't there more African-Americans in Silicon Valley?

AYORI SELASSIE: I think it's all social. I think it's all about community and how people gain exposure and how people gain support in those communities. So particularly in the Africa-American community, we've had - we've suffered from the digital divide for a long time. Now we see that closing with mobile devices and things of that nature, but that divide has affected our communities and our society until this point. And so parents are particularly unprepared to handle their children and to support their children in STEAM and STEM - STEM especially. And so we really need to address that social issue and help in that area."