Jeff Forbes may be on leave from Duke but not from computer science. The associate professor of the practice is serving for a year as a program director for the National Science Foundation’s Education and Workforce Cluster in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering. Since May, he has been co-managing two initiatives: Broadening Participation in Computing Alliance and Computing Education for the 21st Century.

“In so doing, Jeff continues his enthusiastic work in computer science instruction and on reaching out to underrepresented groups and attracting them to our field,” Computer Science Chairman Carlo Tomasi said. “As a department, we are very glad to support his efforts in this direction, although, of course, we miss him here.”

Although enrollment in computer science is picking up after a big slump in 2000-2006, the field still has a hard time attracting 70 percent of the population — women, people with disabilities, African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans.

“Relative to other fields like math and some engineering fields, we’re doing quite poorly at drawing from those populations,” Forbes said. “We’re the only field that’s getting worse.”

To increase the work force of computer scientists, the NSF is setting its sights on reaching out to students from underrepresented groups and interesting those students earlier.

“Coming up with engaging curriculum, supporting efforts to effectively teach computer science and broaden interest in computer science — that’s what I spend my time worrying about,” Forbes said. “It’s great for me because these are things we think about at Duke as well. And to be able to effect change at a national level is pretty fun for a while.”

For both NSF initiatives, Forbes helps set the direction, works with the principal investigators, runs peer review panels, recommends proposals for funding, and manages the resulting awards portfolios.

“Jeff is a well-known and well-respected member of the computing education community. We are really lucky to have him here, and I’m delighted to be working with him,” said Janice Cuny, NSF program director for computing education.

One goal they are working on is to have 10,000 well-prepared instructors teaching an engaging computing curriculum in 10,000 middle and high schools by 2015. Many secondary schools have no computer science courses or have courses that fail to engage or are not reflective of the field, Forbes noted. Yet the foundation is far from reaching its goal.

“We know very little about how people learn computer science or when they should learn certain topics in computer science,” said Forbes, whose work at Duke informs the work he does at the NSF. Through the introductory courses he teaches, he sees a lot of the issues he’s now working to combat.

His course on the science of networks is a possible way to broaden participation as it tackles some of the interesting, deep topics of computer science at a level in which students without computer backgrounds can participate. Almost no programming is involved in the course. Instead students might analyze data from their own lives as they study how things are connected.

Forbes — who joined Duke in 2001 after earning his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley — also has been learning about how to interest students at an earlier age through the Duke Robotics Education Enrichment and Mentoring project, which he started in 2004. The after-school program, now open to all middle and high school students in the Durham Public Schools, is taught by Duke undergraduates enrolled in the Teaching with Robots course.

“We’re trying to increase both interest and hopefully competence in computing and math and perhaps engineering too,” Forbes said.