I am particularly interested in promoting STEM areas to women, not only because programming is a passion of mine — one that I have found to be a rather lonely field for women — but also because we see so few women in the Game industry, let alone on the development side. Becker College’s Design Department, through Paul Cotnoir, was approached by Geek is Glam to apply to develop and deliver courses for this conference held on the WPI campus. The goal is to teach middle school girls about the sciences and foster an interest in STEM fields. Amanda Theinert and I applied and were accepted into the conference.

We created and developed two courses of which we ran two sections a piece. One was an introduction to video game development, based on our college introductory course as well as the lesson plan we made for a Worcester Youth seminar we ran previously. We provided a framework and various art assets so that the young women could focus on a few core programming tasks that would then culminate in unique games. The students were able to alter and customize their games depending on which code elements they chose to integrate and the variable settings they specified. With this approach, we were able to demonstrate the power of code in a short period of time.

For the other course, targeted at a slightly younger group, I used conductive paint, resistors, and LEDs to teach some elementary tenets of electricity. I designed and built an interactive game board that played themed music depending on the student-made piece that was fitted into it. The students were divided into teams of four and each group had to follow schematics [extremely basic] in order to make functioning pieces that would fit and play the appropriate music for their group’s theme. The students were able to take home their pieces, a tube of conductive paint, and a schematic to continue exploration at home.

Outcomes: Theinert and I felt very fortunate to stimulate young women’s interest in the fields of programming and electronics, which is related to game hardware integration — another shared passion of ours.