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Last week 20 young girls went to a Girls Make Games workshop to celebrate Computer Science Education Week. That’s not terrible unique, but the venue might raise a few eyebrows: It took place at the White House, part of an effort by the U.S administration to support women in games development.
Girls Make Games has come a long way since it grew out of a single tweet in 2014. In that time it’s grown under the stewardship of LearnDistrict cofounder Leila Shabir to impressive proportions and this is the first time a Girls Make Games development event has taken place in the White House.
Computer Science Education Week is a global event and just last week we reported on Justin Trudeau making a game of his own to support the initiative. The 20 girls who attended — aged between 11-14 — came from 8 different states across the US and each went away after the workshop with a certificate, a prototype of their game, a stack of information they could use to continue their attempts at game development and some chocolate, for the more immediate future.
"It was incredibly inspiring for the girls to be at a venue like The White House – when you look at bodies of government you don’t really imagine you’ll be coding a game there some day, or that your passion for games would even matter to them (and by extension, the world)," Shabir told the site Gamasutra in an email interview.
U.S politics is, in the politest and most politically neutral way, be about to undergo a pretty big change, and it’s not 100% certain where computer sciences will be prioritised in the new administration, so that this has made it into the last month of Obama’s tenure as President is a positive step for diversity in the industry.
