[sarajo]

Far be it for me to be prescriptive about what girls and boys should like. Truly, we think of ourselves as more "feminine" in design. Some boys like things that are feminine, there are many people that identify as feminine.

We are here to change the number of coders that identify as female. In order to do that, we talked to a lot (over 200!) of kids that identify as female and built what they asked us to build.

You can read more about our reasoning here: https://medium.com/jewelbots-weblog/what-if-we-could-build-m...

and my view on femininity here: https://medium.com/thelist/papas-please-let-your-babies-grow...

Thank you for your feedback and thoughts, these conversations are super important if we are going to change the number of women in computer science.

[sudosteph]

Thanks for sharing your reasoning. I can't say I'm on the same page when it comes to femininity, though there's no reason to get into that here. I do see where you're coming from and appreciate the time and effort you're putting towards making it a reality. It is a pretty cool product to boot. If you ever do a programmable digital pet, I'll be all over that.

[sarajo]

Thank you! I respect your opinion as well, it's great to hear it. We all have our own version of feminism, and everyone is working towards similar goals. Man, making the next Tamagotchi would be amazing, I wonder if anyone has started?

[sudosteph]

Doooo iiitttt!!! :D

Imagine if it evolved differently based on how you programmed it and other virtual pets you encountered.

Could be really fun, but I understand if you have too much on your plate as is!

[follower]

FWIW a number of years ago I created a concept for a virtual pet toy that was aimed at exploring alternate approaches which might encourage girls--who may not have been previously interested--to learn to code and other computer science related concepts (such as state machines).

One interesting aspect that GoldieBlox's research mentioned was that they found girls became more engaged when there was a story with a purpose (e.g. help this puppy) or opportunity for story-telling.

This made me wonder if there would be potential for combining an already popular electronic toy concept (virtual pets) with a programming environment that was also a story-telling environment. The behavior of the pet would be determined by a state machine generated from the story.

For example:

    Hello my name is [Oinky].
    When I am [tired] I [sometimes] want to [play].
    When I am [hungry] I [always] want to [eat].

Then the state machine for the virtual pet could be generated from that. (And associated graphical appearance, sounds etc.) Another appealing aspect of the virtual pet form factor was that low-resolution pixel art was accessible (in terms of skill required) and wouldn't look out of place. (I also believe there's a lot of value in a tangible physical "thing" that people can carry & show-off.)

I ended up getting a bit distracted by the more generic question of how to produce a platform of enclosures & electronics that would enable people to prototype hand-held Arduino-based devices. (And then other things.) But I still think the idea is worth exploring.

Some online notes on these two projects:

* http://www.labradoc.com/i/follower/p/project-pet-designer-to...

* http://www.labradoc.com/i/follower/p/project-arduino-enclosu...

Offers of investment and/or consulting welcomed. :D

(With regard to a non-gendered Computer Science curriculum "Computer Science Unplugged" might be of interest: http://csunplugged.org/ )

[marci]

If only Jewelbots and Arduboy[0] had a baby device together... Maybe they should start by putting a ring on it, arduboy already made a (precious) bluetooth one [1]

[0] https://arduboy.com [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDXsLxPPB88

[follower]

You might like to check out my other reply re:virtual pets... :)

Also, if you haven't already, you might be interested in researching Dr. Janese Swanson the founder of the "GirlTech" toy company (from mid-90s to early 2000s, I think) and maybe even trying to get in contact with her as she might have some valuable insight/opinions/contacts from her own experience for you.

I always appreciated the perspective that Pam Fox shared in her "I’m A Barbie Girl In A CS World" presentation:

* https://www.slideshare.net/wuzziwug/im-a-barbie-girl-in-a-cs... * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIhPYefRndc

How's your experience of the Nordic nRF51822 been? My impression has been that they have some great technology but their tooling/SDK support doesn't seem to put much weight on easing transition from one SDK/IC version to another.

[Moru]

I don't think the problem is that girls don't want to code, we males are just crap at encouraging girls and even mentally abusing women trying to work in tech-jobs. This shows up on the news pretty often still.

Just look at the early days of computers, it was a womans job :-)