Girls Creating Games

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."

Challenges & Strategies

Challenges:

• The Flash™ program is not based on a simple or intuitive set of principles.
  "For example, the way that Flash™ is set up is similar to movie-making. There are 'frames,' and 'frame rates' measured in frames-per-second. However, you can also embed something, like an animation, in a single frame and that thing can run for a longer amount of time than what the frame represents in the timeline. This can be difficult for middle school youth to understand conceptually."
• Limits on program time
  "It is difficult for kids this age to build and complete very sophisticated games in just a couple of weeks. We had to start with making simple games that strengthen girls' creation of interactive stories."
• There are few high-quality 'how-to' resources on project-based learning with Flash™ that are appropriate for youth.
  "There is almost nothing written in the way of Flash™ instructional materials for youth. We had to construct all of our instructional materials from scratch."

Strategies:

• Don't lecture youth about what they need to do. Use a demonstrative instructional material such as a flowchart that enables them to visualize the steps they need to follow to complete a task or learn a skill. more
• Create a collaborative learning environment instead of a solitary one.
  1) A collaborative learning structure called "pair-programming" has been a key strategy in Girls Creating Games.
  2) A variety of peer support activities are essential for creating a collaborative learning environment that can counter girls' belief in negative stereotypes around technology and also promotes their interdependence for learning skills. more
• Design a project-based learning approach to technology skills. more
• Foster new technology skills through communication with experts. more
• Promote reflective activities focused on gender and IT.  more
• Create a program that appeals to youth identity and gender identity, and then allow them to use technology to reflect those identities. more
• Evaluate youth outcomes around confidence and their capacity to act as "intrepid explorers." more

Strategies in detail:

• Don't lecture youth about what they need to do. Use a demonstrative instructional material such as a flowchart that enables them to visualize the steps they need to follow to complete a task or learn a skill.

  "We give the girls a skill-practice assignment and a flowchart that they can follow along with, step by step. We created flowcharts for each individual Flash skill needed to build the interactive story game. The flowchart breaks the skill down into steps and gives some tips about what to look out for when using the skill on the computer. Then, we show them a demonstration of what the skill looks like in a finished product. Next, with girls following along on the flowchart, we walk through the steps of the skills, showing them what it looks like on the computer using an LCD projector. We try to keep the time we spend talking about the skill to less than 10 minutes."

• Create a collaborative learning environment instead of a solitary one.

  Girls Creating Games uses two strategies for collaborative-learning:

  1) "Pair-programming" has been a key collaborative learning strategy.
  
  "Pair-programming is being used in industry and university settings as a basis for research on how to improve programming outcomes. It has been found to both increase the skills and decrease the number of mistakes made by computer programmers. In our program, typical of a pair programming partnership, girls work together side by side at a single computer and give each other support. One girl is a 'driver' who operates the keyboard and mouse, and the other girl is a 'navigator' who makes decisions collaboratively with the driver. The role of the navigator is 1) to watch what the driver is doing and look for potential problems, such as design flaws, 2) to manage all the instructional materials. At this point, the flowcharts are the primary instructional reference when the pair of girls tries to learn a new skill. This collaborative structure deconstructs the myth of IT as a solitary pursuit."

  2) A variety of peer support activities are essential for creating a collaborative learning environment that can counter negative stereotypes about girls' computer skills, and for promoting their interdependent learning.

  "One example of a peer-based activity is our 'Gallery Walk' showcasing activity, where the girls break up into small groups, go around and look at each other's projects, and provide feedback or ideas about them. We teach them how to give feedback in supportive and constructive ways. We also do an 'Affirmation' activity once every week where girls write an affirmation or positive statement about something positive that they saw in someone else's work related to technology. They write the statement on a piece of paper and read it out loud. It makes the girls feel supported. We try to build a 'community-of-learners,' a technique used in mainstream classrooms by teachers who know how to bring the class together and cultivate classroom community."

Back to Strategies

• Design a project-based learning approach to technology skills.

  "Apply the notion of project-based learning to your program. We avoid teaching our participants things in didactic ways or imagining that they are going to learn skills the way we want them to learn. Instead, project-based learning makes the participants cement their mastery of Flash skills through the process of building their own games. This is why 'project-based learning' is very effectively used in technology education and in science education to help students apply the principles of science."

• Foster new technology skills through communication with experts.

  "Our staff do not have technology education backgrounds. We did not start with very good knowledge of Flash and IT educational principles. As a result, we had a huge curve to climb in learning Flash and how to teach it. In the meantime, we were able to save a lot of our time by learning things from other tech-savvy people such as our 'role models', who are female teaching assistants with strong backgrounds and interests in technology. They have volunteered, or received small stipends to attend program sessions and assist the girls directly with game construction. The backgrounds of our 'role models'/ teaching assistants, in technology, and their own experiences as women learning technology skills made them really valuable resources to our girls. Their feedback and observations about our program design also helped us figure out good ways of teaching technology skills to youth."

• Promote reflective activities focused on gender and IT.

  "Generally, compared to men, women are usually consumers of technology but not producers of it. We created an activity called 'Finding Out About Jobs& Skills', It was based on a fictitious organizational chart for a computer game design company that wanted to employ girls from our program. Girls get to pick jobs that they'd like to have in the company based on their preferences and skills, and read information about the job. They interview each other for the job, using a set of questions we provide. This reinforces the idea that there are a variety of different places for women in technology as 'producers'."

Back to Strategies

• Create a program that appeals to youth identity and gender identity, and then allow them to use technology to reflect those identities.

  "Girls look at technology from the standpoint of identity, by comparing what they see in the program and what they see as their identity. If those things do not fit with each other, girls will not come or will not stay. Therefore, recruit the girls who don't think they're interested in technology but who could be, and could develop their skills. Respond to their mistaken notion of 'technology as being solitary and anti-social' by making your program collaborative and social. Since our participants make games based on story narratives about themselves, they are engaged in technology through the expression of their own identity."

• Evaluate youth outcomes around confidence and their capacity to act as "intrepid explorers."

  "We are not measuring academic outcomes, but 'affective' outcomes. We collect a lot of data, do pre- and post-test surveys with the girls that measure their attitudes towards computers, self-reported skill levels and their confidence. When you look at girls academically in IT disciplines, you don't see gender differences in terms of ability or skills. But when you look at girls' perceptions of themselves, they believe they are less skilled than boys. So, look at research on how girls develop their self-perceptions and how you can change these self-perceptions. We think the MIT professor Sherry Turkle's concept of the 'intrepid explorer' may be a good model for how girls' self-perceptions affect their interest and engagement with IT. Looking at people who are 'intrepid explorers' may be a good way to characterize some important differences between people who persevere through learning challenges and people who don't. Our hypothesis is that people who persevere tend to have this quality of being intrepid explorers. They have curiosity and 'intrepidness' to go places without really knowing how to get there. Youth who are intrepid explorers are willing to 'go for it,' to try new things on the computer. They do not get overly frustrated if it fails. They continue to try to solve the problems and be successful. We've really latched on to that construct of the intrepid explorer and are trying to figure out what kind of factors promote or get in the way of girls' becoming intrepid explorers. The pair-programming structure allows our participants to have somebody right there to support them, help them make decisions, and solve their problems. In that respect, the pairing might really boost each partner's intrepid explorations. But we need to be aware of some issues. If a partner is less skilled or less confident than the other, she might be holding back the other partner from exploring as far as she could on the computer. Therefore, what we also need to do is to answer some other kinds of questions about how girls prefer to learn and how those issues are related to their becoming intrepid explorers."