An alarming national trend in 1993-94 was the sharp decrease in the numbers of graduates in computer science and engineering. Exacerbating this situation was the disturbingly chronic underrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos among computer science and engineering graduates, as well as the dismal graduation rates in these fields of students who transferred from two-year colleges to four-year colleges.

Project ACCESS was designed to help reverse these trends, by ensuring the greatest possible opportunity of obtaining B.S. degrees in Computer Science or Computer Engineering to the predominantly African American and Hispanic graduates of the Community Colleges of the City University of New York.

ACCESS sought to link the computer science programs of CCNY and the CUNY community colleges by: (1) training community college faculty in the innovative techniques for teaching introductory computer programming that had been developed by Professor Douglas Troeger at CCNY; (2) having CCNY and community college faculty co-teach an intensive summer course for students considering transferring into CCNY; (3) co-operatively developing with community college faculty a pedagogically effective presentation of the new approach for their own campuses; (4) establishing on-going collaborative efforts among participating faculty with workshops and electronic networking.

ACCESS buillt on the TRACC program (Transfer Retention at City College) already in place in the School of Engineering at CCNY; TRACC was/is a comprehensive support program, targeted primarily to students transferring to CCNY from the 2-year colleges of the City University of New York system.

The City University of New York provided $45,000 to fund a pilot version of the ACCESS program, run in the Spring and Summer of 1993. A total of six community college faculty and twenty-two community college students participated in the pilot program.

FIPSE funding was obtained in 1994.  In the summers of 1995 and 1996, we offered four-week workshops, with participation over the two summers by 29 community college faculty and 53 community college students, representing Borough of Manhattan Community College, Bronx Community College, Hostos Community College, Kingsborough Community College, and Queensborough Community College.   In the summer of 1997, several community college students participated in a specially supported section of the introductory course.   In addition, doctoral students from CCNY who were thoroughly trained in the course methodology -- Jaime Davila, Marco Morazan, and Myles Nash -- provided on-site instruction in logic-based program design to students at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Bronx Community College, and Hostos Community College in the 1995 - 1996 academic year.