Gamer Girlz

Our next post is from Pat Yongpradit, a teacher at Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, telling us about his project. Thanks Pat we’ll see you in South Africa!!

My project is about getting girls interested in continuing their computer science education by exposing them to the fun and challenge of game programming.  I have a club called the Springbrook Women in Technology and we won a grant of 700.00 from the Maryland Education Enterprise Consortium with which we bought several Microsoft Zunes. 

The girls worked together to program games in XNA Game Studio using the C# language and put them on the Zune.  It was hard work, but allowed the girls to explore a different side of computer programming.  They had to extend their prior knowledge, figure out solutions to novel problems, and constrain their design to a portable device.  In essence, the project was about enjoying learning and creating something fun.  The girls all continued in their CS studies and best of all, they are enjoying themselves.