The Girl Empowerment and Mentoring (GEM) for Computing Project aims to inspire middle and high school girls towards computing in post-secondary education by

1. empowering them with skills and interest for IT, and
2. mentoring them to improve their self-efficacy and motivation for a career in IT.

Specifically, we will establish a comprehensive state-wide writing program and contest where

1. secondary school girls collaborate to create learning material on the use of computing in real-world applications,
2. female students at our Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department will be recruited to serve as big sisters to mentor the participants throughout the writing process,
3. CSE faculty will be recruited to judge the learning material entries, and the winners will be awarded scholarships to attend the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) to study CS.

Each learning material is required to include a well organized tutorial on a particular CS topic (such as Artificial Intelligence) and an insightful illustration of the use of the topic in a real-world application (such as Intelligent Tutoring Systems).