Girls Make Games: summer camps and game jams for girls
One way to address gender bias in videogames?
To Laila Shabir, Girls Make Games is a positive answer to an industry-wide problem.
It was while working with her team at Learn District to hire two new employees that the founder and CEO discovered a disturbing problem: although Laila wanted to recruit a fellow woman to join the team, female game programmers were nearly impossible to find.
Frustrated, she took to Twitter to voice her concerns. “I literally just tweeted ‘how can we get more girls interested in programming for games?’” she recalls. “My second or third tweet was something like ‘maybe we should start a summer camp or something for younger girls.’”
The idea garnered a massive positive response, with emails coming in from all over the world asking how people could help support the cause.
A few months later, the first official Girls Make Games camp took place in June 2014 in the Bay Area.
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