Designing opportunities to spark and nurture scientific inquiry in middle school girls

  • Authors:

  • Kristin Hughes

  • Affiliations:

  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

  • Venue:
  • DUX '05 Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Designing for User eXperience
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Our project, Click! Urban Adventure, was designed to immerse middle school girls in an interactive, mixed-reality game that provides them with the tools they need to learn discipline-specific science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills. The 11 to 14 year old girls who participated in Click! used the city as their game board and STEM components as their tools. As part of the game, the girls take on the role of Click! Special Agents as they think, talk and reason their way towards solving an environmental science-based mystery.Our research team worked carefully to reshape the conventional framework of formal education and apply it to the landscape of everyday experiences. Click! was designed to show middle school girls, often underrepresented in science and technology, that understanding the world through a scientific lens can be stimulating, relevant, contextual and rewarding [2].