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Project Summary
Girl Game Company
Description
The aim of Girl Game Company (GGC) has been to increase middle school girls’ interest, ability, and motivation to pursue education and careers in IT. The focus is on Latina girls in middle school in the Pájaro Valley Unified School District. GGC met after school and during the summer, over 16 months, for a total of 260 program hours. The program has focused on teaching girls to design and program their own computer games and to produce a 3D animation to introduce one of their games. Another critical focus has been career identity exploration, including social networking with female professional role models in IT fields and field trips to colleges and technology companies. Girls published their games on, and participated in, the Whyville online virtual world where GGC has a virtual presence: in the Girl Game Company Clubhouse, a virtual Teachers Lounge, where educators can access instructional materials developed through this grant and a prototype Game Design Studio where Whyvillians can build their own games. GGC also offered parent and family education opportunities intended to increase support for girls to pursue IT. The project experimented with other innovative components, such as simulating a game company in which each participant served in one of four departments: production, design, human resources, and marketing. The project also developed and experimented with a five-lesson curriculum that taught participants the fundamentals of astrobiology and guided their development of an astrobiology-themed video game. ETR conducted a formative evaluation of GGC and researchers from WestEd conducted an impact evaluation. This project built on the work of our Girls Creating Games project. Now, GGC game-building and animation curricula serve as nine-week afterschool programs in our larger Latino youth IT career pathways program called Watsonville-TEC. GGC has led to new research directions, e.g., examining whether digital game building increases computational thinking in the iGame project.
Project Director/Principal Investigator
| Jill Denner |
Funded by
National Science Foundation (NSF)Website(s)
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