Girls Creating Games

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About the Program

Girls Creating Games is an after-school program for middle school girls developed by Education, Training Research Associates (ETR). The participants are girls in grades 6-8. The program meets twice a week for two hours for twelve weeks during each semester at New Brighton Middle School in the Soquel Elementary School District in Capitola, California. During the summer it meets four times a week for six weeks at the Santa Cruz Boys & Girls Club.

The Goals of This Program:

• To increase girls' interest, confidence and competence in Information Technology (IT), and encourage them to pursue educational and career paths that would keep them in the "technology pipeline."
• To help girls develop resiliency toward gender barriers through a variety of strategies.

Program Activities:

Participants in this program create computer games, which are interactive story narratives, with Macromedia's Flash™ program. The idea for the game structure came from a series of books in the 1980's, called "Choose-your-own-adventure," where readers select a path at key decision points in the story, to create their own series of events. Based on this model, the participants work in pairs to write stories about themselves or their interests and produce Flash games to tell the stories. The final products are posted on the internet. Even though every pair uses the same program, each individual story and its organization is unique.

The reason why the participants create Flash games is that:

• "Games in general are not usually designed for, developed for and marketed to girls and young women."
• "Games are an important gateway to explore and establish interests and engagement in IT."
• "Macromedia's Flash™ program is contemporary and commercially viable."

Funding Source and Research:

Girls Creating Games is a program supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Research on Gender Equity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (GSE). The mission of this after-school program is aligned with the NSF GSE's core value of encouraging young women to build leadership and to pursue advanced education and careers in Information Technology (IT).
"Our program recognizes that adolescent girls face particular barriers to their interest in IT, including negative stereotypes about involvement in IT, IT learning environments hostile to females, and an absence of good IT tools and products developed by and for women, especially young women. The purpose of this program is to show the research findings on what kind of factors keep young women in the "IT pipeline."