(Article by Marie Monique Schaper)
Together with Laura Malinverni, I facilitated two GirlsTech Summer Camps during the month of July 2017. The general aim of both workshops was to introduce girls between 9 and 12 years through playful hands-on activities to the world of STEM and promote their interest in scientific vocations in this field. The first workshop was held at the American Space Barcelona and focused on technologies in digital fabrication such as 3D printing, basics of coding and robotics. The second workshop was carried out at the Library Carles Rahola in Girona. We instructed girls in the design process of interactive narratives based on Augmented Reality from the concept idea, script writing, content creation to the implementation of the final narrative. The summer camps were co-organized by the American Consulate, Ministry of Culture (Generalitat de Catalunya) and the Department of Information and Communication Technologies of Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
In total 40 girls participated in the summer camps. They showed a high engagement during the activities and succeeded in translating their own ideas into innovative technology solutions. For instance, one highlight during the Digital Fabrication workshop in Barcelona was a group of six girls that designed and developed their own “DogRobot”. Also during the Augmented Reality workshop in Girona, we were amazed by girls’ creativity and motivation in putting forward their ideas. They used elements of their daily (imaginative) lives such as unicorns, bailarinas and donuts, digitized and integrated them into their interactive narratives.
On the last day of each summer camp, we invited the parents to give the participating girls the opportunity to present the outcomes of their work. We believe that these events are as much important as the workshops itself. The presentations make parents aware of what their daughters are capable of, increase their interest in promoting technology related activities for their children and simulate reflections upon their own values related to gender stereotypes.
The STEM and Gender program has been particularly meaningful to me and Laura. In our research, we work with participatory methods to empower children in the design of future technology. Participatory Design has its origin in the Scandinavian countries. In its early stages, users were involved to understand their use of technologies and how these affected their lives. This claim also stresses the importance of the involvement of both genders because each of them can bring a different perspective into the design process.
Related Publications:
Marie-Monique Schaper, Maria Santos, Laura Malinverni and Narcis Pares. (2017). Towards the Design of a Virtual Heritage Experience based on the World-as-Support Interaction Paradigm. In Proceedings of the 35th CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’17). DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3027063.3053089
Laura Malinverni, Julian Maya, Marie-Monique Schaper and Narcis Pares. (2017). The World-as-Support: Embodied Exploration, Understanding and Meaning-Making of the Augmented World. In Proceedings of the 35th CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’17). DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025955
Marie-Monique Schaper, Laura Malinverni, and Narcis Pares. (2014). Participatory design methods to define educational goals for full-body interaction. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 50. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2663806.2663867
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