Future Now
The IFTF Blog
The secret of encouraging girls to be geeks
Carlos McEvilly is a self-confessed "geek dad" of a tween. He wanted give girls an opportunity to learn that being a geek can be cool, so he created an iPhone app called Secret Ada. From the App Store description:
Science and technology are NOT cool, especially for GIRLS. That message gets signaled to children every day by friends, schoolmates, and even teachers. Secret Ada aims to counteract that idea. As you solve each puzzle, you build up a growing collection of profiles of inspiring women in science and technology.
The game involves a series of cryptogram puzzles, each of which, when solved, profiles the work of an inspiring women in science or technology. When the player is done cracking all of the codes (kind of a geeky but cool endeavor in and of itself), she is left with an ebook full of great role models! Secret Ada is intended to "present these positive role models in a fun way that might be more engaging, over a longer time, than a more traditional presentation." (For more on the effectiveness of engaging people by making their experiences more fun, see IFTF's report, Engagement Economy.)
Time will tell whether Carlos McEvilly's daughter will develop a passion for science and technology as a result of Secret Ada, but it can't hurt that she is being exposed to these important pioneers in science and technology.*
As the description of Secret Ada concludes,
Children get many cues about their potential roles in society - from peers, teachers, parents, and media. Sometimes we could do a better job of helping girls - and boys, too, for that matter - to understand not only how much women contribute, but also how much fun it can be to be involved in science or technology as a career.
*Secret Ada is named after Ada Lovelace, who in the 1800s envisioned and described the way computer programming would work, even before computers existed.