The following is the introductory couple pages of a monster paper I'm just finishing up about tech education for girls and young women and how educational gaming might offer a way forward. This little bit includes a rehashing of my oft cited introduction to vectors, as well as some other thoughts about how I learned to be comfortable with technology.
With the firm understanding that anecdote is not evidence, I'd like to introduce this paper with a short series of interlocking anecdotes about my childhood experience of technology and mathematics.
When I was young, I can't quite remember just how young, I learned to type using video games. Some time in the early 90s, Super Mario and Mavis Beacon taught me to type. This was at home, on a 386 computer which was housed in my room. That part alone is a little atypical. Convention tends to dictate that if one child in the family is going to have constant, in-room access to the computer, it's the son. So I learned to type at quite a young age, with the aid of fictional characters and games.
My brother didn't learn to type the same way. Mario didn't seem to help much and Mavis not at all. My brother, instead, learned to type in the early 2000s, when he began to use instant messaging applications to talk to his friends. The necessity of typing quickly, in order to keep up the flow of conversation, taught him to type.
All along, we had the same tools, but our paths of learning differed drastically.
In the mid 80s, when my brother was quite young and before I was even born, he spent hours and hours in the nearby corner store, playing the big arcade games they had. He stood on a milk crate. Our mother, to this day, maintains that it was those hours of video gaming that developed my brother's hand-eye coordination skills.
We were lucky. My father, in the early 90s, quit his government job and instead became a high school tech teacher at a technically focused Catholic school. They had the best toys. My seminal experience, though, was not with those big, hardware-oriented toys. For me, it was in front of that old computer in my room. There are two lessons that stand out. One day, my father introduced me to programming with QBasic. He explained how we could write code to place geometric objects on the screen. The practical takeaway from this, very fitting for a quite young child, was the combination of circles and lines to create a winking cat face. Round face, pointy ears and circular eyes, one of which alternated with a horizontal line to give the impression of winking.
The other seminal experience, one which I still talk and write about to this day, was my introduction to vector graphics. In CorelDRAW 3.0, we opened a clip art silhouette of a horse. Using the node selection tool, my father showed me how to select the point on top of the ear, extend it and turn the horse into a unicorn.
Neither of these experiences was directly game related. What they were, though, were potent explorations of the practical realities of technology and mathematics. That winking cat not only introduced me to QBasic and programming in general, but also to Cartesian space, which has been undoubtedly the most useful mathematical concept I've ever learned. The winking cat program taught me how to practically apply Cartesian space a good seven years before my math teacher ever expressed the x and y axes as "walking to the tree, then climbing it."
These explorations, practical, small and rewarding, have been seminal experiences for me. I was, as I said, lucky. Most girls do not grow up being given practical, exploratory and exciting experiences with math, science and technology. Most girls get their first real experience in the classroom, an environment which prizes rote learning and understanding of theory over practice and problem solving.
With the firm understanding that anecdote is not evidence, I'd like to introduce this paper with a short series of interlocking anecdotes about my childhood experience of technology and mathematics.
When I was young, I can't quite remember just how young, I learned to type using video games. Some time in the early 90s, Super Mario and Mavis Beacon taught me to type. This was at home, on a 386 computer which was housed in my room. That part alone is a little atypical. Convention tends to dictate that if one child in the family is going to have constant, in-room access to the computer, it's the son. So I learned to type at quite a young age, with the aid of fictional characters and games.
My brother didn't learn to type the same way. Mario didn't seem to help much and Mavis not at all. My brother, instead, learned to type in the early 2000s, when he began to use instant messaging applications to talk to his friends. The necessity of typing quickly, in order to keep up the flow of conversation, taught him to type.
All along, we had the same tools, but our paths of learning differed drastically.
In the mid 80s, when my brother was quite young and before I was even born, he spent hours and hours in the nearby corner store, playing the big arcade games they had. He stood on a milk crate. Our mother, to this day, maintains that it was those hours of video gaming that developed my brother's hand-eye coordination skills.
We were lucky. My father, in the early 90s, quit his government job and instead became a high school tech teacher at a technically focused Catholic school. They had the best toys. My seminal experience, though, was not with those big, hardware-oriented toys. For me, it was in front of that old computer in my room. There are two lessons that stand out. One day, my father introduced me to programming with QBasic. He explained how we could write code to place geometric objects on the screen. The practical takeaway from this, very fitting for a quite young child, was the combination of circles and lines to create a winking cat face. Round face, pointy ears and circular eyes, one of which alternated with a horizontal line to give the impression of winking.
The other seminal experience, one which I still talk and write about to this day, was my introduction to vector graphics. In CorelDRAW 3.0, we opened a clip art silhouette of a horse. Using the node selection tool, my father showed me how to select the point on top of the ear, extend it and turn the horse into a unicorn.
Neither of these experiences was directly game related. What they were, though, were potent explorations of the practical realities of technology and mathematics. That winking cat not only introduced me to QBasic and programming in general, but also to Cartesian space, which has been undoubtedly the most useful mathematical concept I've ever learned. The winking cat program taught me how to practically apply Cartesian space a good seven years before my math teacher ever expressed the x and y axes as "walking to the tree, then climbing it."
These explorations, practical, small and rewarding, have been seminal experiences for me. I was, as I said, lucky. Most girls do not grow up being given practical, exploratory and exciting experiences with math, science and technology. Most girls get their first real experience in the classroom, an environment which prizes rote learning and understanding of theory over practice and problem solving.
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