Durham, NC - Sarah Walker, a freshman from Fullerton, California, had no interest in computer science when she came to Duke last fall. But when another class didnt fit into her schedule, she signed up for Dukes introductory computer science course, Compsci 101.

I thought I would be surrounded by tech geeks who sat alone at their computers all day, Walker said. But I came to realize that computer science lets you do things that are applicable to all sorts of fields.

Now shes using her new computational savvy to expand a nonprofit she founded in high school to raise money for an elephant sanctuary in Thailand.

You wouldnt think that running a nonprofit requires a lot of technical skills, but it does, she said. You get a problem and you think, I could solve this on paper and it would take me 25 hours, or I can write one line of code and all of a sudden theres my answer. The efficiency of it is super cool.

Long viewed as the entry point for a field dominated by male coders and computer whizzes, Compsci 101 is undergoing a transformation at Duke. Women undergraduates now comprise 45 percent of the students. (Nationally, women make up only 14 percent of those who go on to major in computer science.) The numbers of Hispanic and African American students have also risen.

Overall enrollment in the class this academic year swelled to 318 students in the fall and 297 this spring, the most ever.

Since 2010, computer science professors have been revamping the course to place more emphasis on real-world applications and solving problems in small groups with peer tutors. Many lectures include discussions about Duke alumni who took the course, or professionals doing creative work in the field.

Most important, class lessons are now more fun and appeal to a broader range of students.

Breanna Polascik, a freshman from Chapel Hill, enrolled in the course because she thought it would be a helpful skill set to have if she pursued a graduate degree in business. What I like about computer science is its a really good blend of creativity and logic, she said.

One of Polasciks first assignments was to write a program that moves and turns a virtual pen across the screen to draw a picture. The lesson challenged her and others to learn about loops, a programming concept that instructs a computer to do something over and over again.

Read more:

Computer Science Looks Beyond Nerds