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.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
