This Year's Grace Hopper Submissions

Tonight is the deadline for the 2013 edition of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing's Call for Participation.  Although I wasn't sure I was going to submit anything this year, I ended up submitting twice! Here are the abstracts...

Gram’s House: Encouraging Girls to Consider Computer Science Through Games

Gail Carmichael, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Carolee Stewart-Gardiner, Kean University, Union, New Jersey
Gillian Smith, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

Computer science still faces a significant gender imbalance with women earning less than 20% of degrees.  To address this issue, we designed an educational computer game, Gram’s House, which aims to teach CS concepts and demonstrate how CS can be used for social good.  We will introduce the game concept, demonstrate two early prototypes, report results of a pilot study, and share our future plans, including procedural content generation.


Academic Presentations Don't Have to be Boring, Honest!

Gail Carmichael, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Terri Oda, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Public speaking is an important part of the academic environment: conference presentations help you communicate your work to others in your field, classroom presentations help you teach, and presentations are often a necessary part of getting and keeping any grant funding.  Unfortunately, it is a skill that few academics spend enough time honing.  This workshop will give attendees a crash course in ways to manage complex technical presentations without putting the audience to sleep, including a variety of styles, practice techniques, and refutation of some of the very bad advice often given to inexperienced academic presenters.  We want to emphasize that oral communication is not the same as written communication, and that in many ways a talk is a story about your research: figuring out that story and how to tell it is a very important part of scientific communication.

Coherent Emergent Stories

My thesis project is moving forward, which I'm thrilled about. Here's a high-level abstract that summarizes the system I am working on.

Crafting satisfying narratives while preserving player freedom of action is a longstanding challenge for computer games. Many games use a quest structure, allowing players to experience content nonlinearly. However, this risks creating disjointed stories when side quests only minimally integrate with the main story. We propose a flexible, scene-based story system that reacts dynamically to the player’s actions.

In the proposed system, stories are defined within a graph where nodes represent scenes and edges represent causality. Nodes are tagged with information including possible locations for the scene, the plans or goals connected to the scene, and the agents and objects involved in the scene. At any time, the distance from the player’s current game state to nodes in the story graph is measured according to five dimensions of nonlinearity: time, space, causality, agents involved, and the player’s goal. The system will use the distance to determine what nodes should be available at any given time. Scenes will be modified dynamically according to when and where they ultimately take place, ensuring that each node has a narrative connection to its predecessors. This system allows for potentially connected stories driven by player action, leading to a more cohesive emergent story.

Damsels in Distress

After all the terrible controversy and the failed attempts of sabotaging her Kickstarter campaign, Anita Sarkeesian's first episode of her video series on Tropes VS Women in Video Games is finally online.  It's the first instalment of a two part series on the Damsel in Distress trope, and I have to say, it's kind of depressing!



The video starts by defining what a damsel in distress is: a woman in a helpless situation must be saved by a male character.  (Unlike the guys, she is unable to be the architect of her own escape.)  She is often the main motivation for that character's quest, an integral part of his narrative arc.

The idea has been around for a long time, but the introduction of two properties in 1933 really set things in motion for the trope's use in video games: Popeye the Sailor Man, who constantly rescues Olive Oyl in his adventures, and King Kong.  When Nintendo tasked Miyamoto to design a new arcade game for the North American market, he turned to King Kong for inspiration after failing to get rights to Popeye.  Enter Donkey Kong.

One of the main problems with this trope is its objectification of women.  It sets up a subject-object dichotomy in which subjects act, objects are acted upon.  Women are objects that are kidnapped and saved.  As one of my favourite quotes from the video says, "In the game of patriarchy, women are not the opposing team. They are the ball."

Many of the examples are from older games, but part two of the video on this trope will look at more modern examples.  It also promises to highlight games that "flip the script" for female characters.  I'm looking forward to it!

What We're Not Doing to Tackle the Women in Tech Issue

Venture Beat recently ran an article about tackling tech's gender problem the right way (according to them, by teaching women to code). Part of the article discusses how initiatives like Hackbright Academy (a 10 week all-female programming boot camp), while positive, are not a long term fix.

 

A little light reading about women in computing! / coleypauline

From the article:

So while we wait to tackle the root of the gendered-tech problem (education of girls beginning before they enter school), decades are passing and tech is becoming more gender biased, not less. In a sense, Hackbright and its ilk are letting motivated, smart women cut the line, perhaps helping to take a few years off the depressingly long curve of qualified women engineers over time.

But the quick fix isn’t the ultimate solution. As Fernandez himself pointed out in a recent blog post, the learn-to-code movement is meeting a very immediate need and fixing a sudden engineer shortage, but it’s not creating a stable, nurturing culture of thoughtful, experienced programmers.

What is the ultimate solution? I don't know, but I often find myself frustrated by the fact that, in many cases, we know something about what works, but don't implement it.

As just one example, the National Center for Women & Information Technology has a wonderful set of resources that both gives insight into the issue and offers solutions.  Two of my favourite techniques that can be used in undergraduate classes are pair programming and peer-led team learning.  These are proven to help retain women and also benefit men.  So why do I see these approaches used so seldomly in formal school settings?

I'm pretty sure that a major part of my life's work is going to be continuing to tackling this issue in high schools and universities.  Bonus if it's connected to a paying job!  If we're lucky, I and everyone else working on this won't have to be at it for too long before there is no longer an issue.  Here's hoping!

My So Called Secret Identity

Have you heard about the comic My So-Called Secret Identity? It's been making quite the buzz among many of my academic and women-in-tech friends.  I finally had a chance to read through the first (free!) issue the other day, and have to say that I love it, too!

The comic is about a girl whose super power is essentially being really smart.  This is no scantily clad girl with her clothes falling and her intelligence in question.  Cat has a great memory and sees the connections in things.  As About Cat says, "she's getting tired of pretending, of hiding, of acting dumb to save other people's feelings.  And if they won't take her seriously as Catherine Abigail Daniels, the [PhD] student and cop's kid, maybe they'll take her seriously in costume."  Even better, the illustrator Suze Shore is a fellow Ottawa resident!

Clearly a recipe for awesome. Go check it out!