A game called Click! Urban Adventure had a big impact on girls ages 11-14 who used Pittsburgh, PA as their game board and STEM skills as their tools. After playing the game, 93% of the girls had a high degree of confidence in their ability to use technology and 78% reported wanting to learn more about the technologies they’d encountered (n=84; 53% were minorities). The girls’ interest in STEM also increased and they recognized the importance of STEM to their education and futures. Read the full paper to find out how the game developers used strategies such as creating team-based experiences for peer groups and leveraging the girls’ existing interests to get these results.
Source: |
Hughes, Kristin. "Designing opportunities to spark and nurture scientific inquiry in middle school girls." Proceedings of the 2005 Conference on Designing for User Experience. AIGA: American Institute of Graphic Arts, 2005. |
The WomenTech Educators Training got us thinking intentionally about who we were going to target for outreach, how we were going to target them, and how we would follow up to make sure we had actual results linked to the different programs and events that we were holding. Since then, it has grown organically and blossomed into something that our college just does naturally.
I think getting together as a team with intention—because we're all so busy—and developing a written plan that we could stick to was what made all the difference. I don’t think we would have ever done that if it wasn't for the WomenTech Educators Training.