Teaching children is hard. I’ve written before about the industry codeswitching between developers and journalists, and trying to keep dev jargon out of my pieces for enthusiast publications.
With the kids, I try to say things like Will your player know he has to try again? and Have you taught your player how to do that? but more often I catch myself telling the 8-years-olds that their games need a narrative arc. My teaching is more effective with the teenagers, who are excited to meet a real professional game developer. (Without fail, someone asks if I know Notch.) I hope that actually seeing a female game designer will show any interested girls that it’s a viable career option, but so far my boy students outnumber my girl students more than ten to one, so they’re also getting the usual message about what game development looks like.
Anyway, after I told my class that a good game has a clear conclusion, one of my students made this as the bad ending:
I don’t remember saying failure state in that class… but I might have.
Related: Other students amusing me with fail.
The very first programming class I took was in pascal. One of the other students figured out how to get modulated sound out of the system and by the end of the semester he had a little Gargamel running around the screen while the smurfs’ theme song played in 8 bit glory.
Back when I was in college, I was one of the teachers at Science Club for Girls: an all-girls after school programme, ages K-6, taught by Harvard/MIT/Tufts engineering, science, and pre-med students.
I remember the parents saying how much their girls liked the Club and how it was the highlight of their weeks. The boys would sometimes grumble that it wasn’t fair that they weren’t allowed to participate, too. Anyway, most of the girls stayed with it all from K-6, and some came on as TAs in eighth and high school.
That was also the time of NerdGirls, with college students who did robot design with younger girls. Anyway, girls have gone from about 15% of engineering students to just shy of 50%, and it’s probably due to the huge outpouring of resources aimed specifically at elementary- and middle-school girls in the late ’90s.
That stands in sharp contradistinction to my hometown’s current Science Olympiad team, which had 29 boys and one girl. (Back in my day, it skewed female.) Apparently, a lot of girls poked their heads into the room during try-outs, saw all the boys, and then casually sauntered off. They also tend to move in packs, and if their friends weren’t doing it, they wouldn’t, either.
I know that you’re teaching these classes, not creating them, but someone should try “Game Development for Girls”. Even a one-day class or seminar can really help to change things. Let me be clear that it’s not a stupid thing wherein you design games about cosmetics, feelings, and Wuthering Heights: it’s the exact same class, just with only girls.
Anyway, game development circa 2025 will look like the classes you’re teaching now.