What do you see?
Do you see a Black woman interacting with colleagues?
Do you see a Latino man co-designing an interface with a client?
No?
Probably you had a mental image of a white man. Don't feel bad, most people, even young children still see a computer scientist as the quintessential computer geek. White, male, and alone with his computer.
As much as we love Steven Jobs, this image of the lone computer geek as the model of a computer scientist stands in the way of many young people who do not look like him ... or his rival, Bill Gates.
This is where the Tech Savvy Girls program, and others like it, intend to intervene. We bring girls into computer labs and turn them loose on computers and the games that they like. We encourage them to use the computers to create things of interest to them, modify games in ways that appeal to them and their friends. And yes, we encourage them to make friends of other technology-literate girls both in person and online. This is part of their story for the past few years ...
.... our story actually starts with an established affinity group. These four girls played the Sims and had taught themselves how to create custom objects for the game during weekend slumber parties.
In every way, they were - and are - typical teen-aged girls. They like clothes and fashion. They are interested in boys and having families. They worry about grades, making the basketball team, and learning to drive. They have their favorite TV shows and create blogs to share their passion with other teens interested in the same things.During three years of research, writing, and conferences, we would continue to try to explain to the audience that these were not atypical kids. They are not exemplars. They are just average girls who have used their creative energies in an emerging way.
But they certainly have become masters of a complex game. They know how to manipulate the rules of the Sims so that they can build castles in the air and make men have babies. They create fashions for their in-game characters to wear. They have used the game to create scenarios for school assignments. They have even used the game to build alternate story lines for their favorite TV shows.
Unsatisfied with the lack of relationship between two main characters on Grey's Anatomy, one of the Tech Savvy Girls recreated characters from the show in the game, arranged for them to fall in love, marry and have two children. Months of work were needed to create avatars that looked like the TV show characters, create hospital clothing and sets, and then carefully manipulate these avatars to form a relationship, marry, and then produce children.
It is easy to dismiss these activities as mere digital doll house play. Many academics have done so, ignoring the complex and sustained creative activity involved in this type of custom game content creation. So, the team decided to try a development platform that was getting a lot of respectful press: Second Life.
We established a private, educational island in Teen Second Life, the age-segregated section of Second Life reserved for people between 13 and 18 and those few adults working on educational projects.
At the dawn of island time, we spent a giddy few days wandering around 65,000 square meters of virtual land. And yes, we danced some too! But big questions loomed in the minds of the educational research team, commingled with our enthusiasm. What would the teens do? What would they build?? In Second Life, we had opened up the world to the girls. They could literally create anything they could imagine - expanding well beyond the boundaries of the content limits of the Sims. But would they continue to focus on the same content and activities? We danced ... and waited to see.
To no one's surprise, the initial focus of the Tech Savvy Girls were on fashion, interior design, and - yes - romance. They created virtual businesses, two of which can be seen in this photograph of the island, offering creations ranging from jewelry and purses, artwork, furniture, and house furnishings to exotic eyelashes (to wear on avatars), candle-light dinners, and delicate roses. 
In some cases, the continued focus on stereotypically girlish subjects took surprisingly educational turns. The fascination with styles lead the girls to focus on the hit musical "Hairspray" - which lead not only to creation of 60s hair styles and fashions but also a consideration of racial and gender equality and a critical exploration of cultural standards of beauty and ideal body types.
In other surprising moments, girls created things completely "out of the box" such as a giant, flying hamburger that appeared one day like a UFO over the island. When questioned about the motivation for this object's creation, the designer replied that it would be a good thing to put over a burger joint, such as those common in the 50s and 60s. Like the oversized Perkins flags, this would be a good marketing tool.
Their take on educational settings was also unusual. When we asked one of the teens to create a classroom for us to use on the island, she created an old-fashioned drive in theater.
Keep in mind that this is something that the girls have never actually seen in real life. But they have heard about them, associated with the 1960s and thought it would be fun to attend class sitting in their virtual cars. At the end of the project, I am not sure that the image of a scientist has changed much in the minds of these girls. They are still more likely to think of a guys hunched over keyboards when they think about who makes the games they have been using for their own ends - as co-creators themselves. But they have come to a place where their career aspirations include digital media creation. They know now their own mastery of technology.
