Ada Lovelace Day: Natalia

In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, I wrote about one of my fellow CU-WISE founders:

I participate in Ada Lovelace Day every year by blogging about my tech heroines.  This year, I had a really hard time deciding who to honour because there are so many worthy candidates! After some thought about what stage of life I'm at and what's happening today for her, I finally settled on Natalia Villanueva-Rosales.

You can read the whole post on my blog.  I hope you'll consider blogging about your tech heroine today, too!

What My Little Ponies have to do with technology

Terri recently wrote a piece on the Geek Feminism blog that I just had to share:

I was the sort of little girl who had over a hundred My Little Ponies, largely due to my mother’s uncanny ability to find them incredibly cheap at garage sales. With so many, we could put on pony musicals where we wrote or adapted all the music and made costumes out of whatever scraps our parents were willing to lend us. My childhood best friend and I built an entire “computer game” for my little sister to play using ponies as the characters (Gameplay was inspired by our favourite adventure game for PC, Monkey Island. Nowadays, I’d call it a roleplaying game but I didn’t know the terminology then.) We had ponies on the bridge of the Enterprise, and ponies going camping on the very conveniently green-carpeted stairs in my house, and ponies ponies ponies.

Definitely check out the entire post here, and find out what a "brony" is in the process.

14 Year Old Airplane Builder

I came across this video and wanted to share it with you. It's about Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski who is very passionate about planes. She took her first flying lessons at the tender age of 9. By the age of 14 she build her first aircraft and flew it at the age of 16.

Her advice is to never let an opportunity to pass you by.

Girl Develop It Ottawa Kicks Off its New Chapter

One of CU-WISE's original founders, Serena Ngai, recently started a new chapter of an organization called Girl Develop It.  It's all about getting non-technical women in Ottawa to learn how to program.  To me, this has the potential to help blur the line between women in tech and women near tech, which can only be a positive thing.

I recently taught at the chapter's kickoff workshop, where participants learned some basics of programming using Scratch.  You can read all about my experience on my own blog.  I also posted on the new blog for the Ottawa chapter, which I encourage you to follow to keep up to date on future happenings.

If you want to learn how to program or just meet a bunch of ladies who are trying it for the first time, be sure to join the Girl Develop It Ottawa Meetup Page!

Women and Going Beyond the Game

From my personal blog:

While it seems to me that many more women are playing traditionally "male" video games these days, there is also a group of women who go beyond the game in ways that, according to James Paul Gee and Elizabeth Hayes, are important to 21st century learning.  An in depth look at this phenomenon and what we can learn from it is described in Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning.

 Read the rest here.

What Do Women Want in Games?

I happened to stumble across this article by the well-known game designer, interactive storyteller, and author Chris Crawford called What Do Women Want (Again)?

I’m intrigued by the renewed interest in this old problem, and dismayed by the complete lack of progress I see. The games community just keeps spinning the same old wheels, getting the same old wrong answers. Really, folks, some community memory would behoove us all. Nearly twenty years ago Midway addressed the problem by creating Ms. Pac-Man. Their market data showed that more women seemed to play Pac-Man than other games, so they put a bow on Pac-Man’s head and voila! the first woman’s game was created. This unpromising beginning has set the standard for all subsequent discussion, a standard that has been rigorously adhered to.

This was written back in 2001, and I can't help but wonder how much progress has been made.  Certainly some I would think, given that it seems more women are playing games than ever before.  Perhaps the advent of social games on the Wii and Kinect have helped by getting more people over the "I'm not a gamer" hump.

What do you think? What games are well designed for the female audience? What games do you adore?

Games for Change Festival 2011

I just got back from New York City for my first visit to the Games for Change Festival. In its eighth year, this year’s festival was held on June 20-22 at New York University.  I wasn’t able to attend the entire conference, but thanks to live streaming I caught most of the Tuesday talks I would have missed otherwise.  (You can watch the archives of the live stream, too!)

I wrote a complete blog post summarizing the event on my own blog, which was also syndicated on BlogHer, which I encourage you to check out.

Here are some other great resources to learn more about the event:

• Livestream video archives
• My (very) rough live notes
• Games for Change: Jesse Schell Keynote
• Video of Jesse Schell's Keynote
• Al Gore champions gaming at Games for Change
• Games for Change 2011: Furniture Forest
• Games for Change 2011: Public Media and Games
• 10 Good Minutes with Dan White of Filament Games