Renee Bryce, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, received the University Level award at the Tech Titans Awards Gala on Aug. 25 for her Bug Catcher and Bug Wars outreach programs. The award includes $25,000.

The Tech Titans’ University Level award recognizes educational institutions that encourage and support students in choosing engineering and technology-related disciplines. The award category spotlights DFW higher educational institutions’ tech-related curricula and incentives to carry out tech-related knowledge transfer.

Bryce is the founder of the Bug Catcher and Bug Wars programs. Bug Catcher is a software testing competition system where students compete to find the most bugs in problem sets as quickly as possible. The competition is accessible to students without programming experience as they may enter test cases based on the requirements. Students with coding experience may work on more advanced problems and use the code to guide their testing, viewing code coverage data as they run test cases. Bug Catcher has reached 2,000-plus high school and undergraduate students in eight years.

Bug Wars is a research experience program that engages undergraduate students in research using emerging technologies. Bug Wars served more than 60 students and was renewed to serve an additional 30 more students.

“The Tech Titans organization is very generous,” said Bryce. “I am grateful to be part of the North Texas tech community, because many people in our community work hard to provide advantages to students in our region through many computing-related outreach projects, such as running camps or competitions, coaching robotics teams, visiting schools and offering help to teachers, organizing workshops, inviting students to work in research labs, and more. Our tech community is generous at every level. I look forward to using the Tech Titans award to scale my outreach projects and helping to grow our community.”