Girls Designing Games, Media, Robots, Selves, and Culture

• In Event: Design-Based Research in Gaming and Virtual Environments

Abstract

This research focuses on how tween-aged girls within a cohort “story” themselves through their design, media, and technology practices. The research more specifically addresses: 1) how or why these girls articulate and reflect upon the ways they are learning and the meanings of their storied selves as they design and share artifacts; 2) interdependencies between their artifacts and stories; and 3) changes inspired by generating and hearing different stories such that these girls and I can come to know from diverse perspectives. The key unit of analysis is girls-in-interaction-with-technology-and-stories wherein artifacts and stories are made, shared, and reproduced. The participants include 30 girls in two summer camps (2009 and 2011) that included learning labs in animation, movie making, robotics, and web design.

This research draws on a range of qualitative research methods, including DBR, autoethnographic, ethnographic, and narrative methods. Ethnographic and narrative methods are used to collect and analyze the stories that girls make and tell about how they learn, who they are, and who they want to become (Bach 1998). DBR and narrative methods are used to concentrate on the artifacts and storied vignettes that girls individually and collectively create about their learning experiences at the 101 Technology Fun “girls only design studio” (i.e., girls designing games, media, robots, selves, and culture). There may be big or grand narratives articulated, but I am primarily interested in the more modest and localized “little stories” that girls contribute (i.e., Lyotard’s petits récits) within our community of educational inquiry. Like Goldman-Segall (1998, p. 273), I believe that: “The purpose of making our perspective clear is to invite others to explore how we see the world… We do not end our search by understanding our own perspectives; that is where we begin our journey. We build out from the centre to fringes that may, in turn, become new centers. And we continue learning by looking for new perspectives that deepen and broaden our ways of looking at the world around us.” Autoethnographic methods are used to address my role in the 101 Technology Fun camps, reflections, and the research stories that I make and tell.

To make sense of the participant-co-researchers’ understandings, a complex dataset was carefully interpreted in a way that embraces the contradictions, tensions, ambiguities, and subjectivities of the girls-in-interaction-with-technology-and-stories (which is the key unit of analysis). Informed by the scholarly work of Bach (1998) and Freeman & Mathison (2009), most notably their guiding principles and frameworks for interpreting visual, verbal and textual material, a montage approach was used to analyze and synthesize findings.

One dimension of analysis honors and details the co-researchers’ original data collected and created— thereby representing their stories and artifacts with minimal analysis. Data selection was guided by Seidel’s (1998) inductive approach to qualitative data analysis (QDA): “a process of noticing, collecting, and thinking about interesting things” (p. 1). A second dimension represents a storied effort at connecting and making sense of the co-researchers’ data from the first dimension.

Author

• Paula MacDowell, The University of British Columbia