Navta Associates

An interesting article about girls and video games. Thankfully, the trend towards more girls finding their way into the professional gaming industry is on the rise. Getting them interested at an earlier age seems to be one of the factors that makes the most difference.

Q4 Technologies is marketing some really neat products! The WowWee Robot and GoRobo software can pair up to provide kids with an incredibly fun learning experience. Kids learn design, programming, and sequencing, among other skills. The robot designs are relatively gender-neutral, so girls and boys can share in this experience equally.

Wish I had one!

Kids may use blogs for various reasons, but one that I came across recently seems particularly noteworthy. A young girl started twenty-five days at the end of 2007, and it’s still going strong. The blog represents this girl’s dedication to being a leader and making a difference. Her current challenge is to make a big difference by doing something small.

The commitment she shows to her blog and the response that she has received are admirable!

Now I’m on the hunt for a blog of similar quality, created by a boy. Have to give both sexes equal air-time! And, I’m always curious about how boys and girls use technology differently.

This game has an education version and a retail version—-clever! In the schools, it seems to be utilized primarily in social studies and history classes, at the high school level. The retail version is played much like other war-strategy games.

The Making History gaming headquarters site is the primary community resource for players where they can share scenarios, find free content, and interact with other players in the community forum.

Retail Version

Education Version

Not surprisingly, at least not to anyone living in my household, a recent NY Times blurb cited a study that men are more likely than women to be strongly attached to their online connections. One of the conclusions drawn is that women seem to value their real-world relationships more than their online ones. Could be quite a leap to infer that boys may feel the same way, but it’s food for thought. There are no girl-children in this household, but the two boys certainly would prefer to live in their online world rather than actually have to carry on even the most mundane of conversations face-to-face. Is this just the result of adolescence, rather than a trait attributable to gender differences?

Not sure if this upholds the study’s findings or contradicts them, but the boys’ online relationships seem to be just as underdeveloped as their real-life ones. An e-mail trail of a 13-year old in my household reads something like:

teen 1: u there?   teen 2: huh   teen 1: whassup?   teen 2: dunno, bored   teen 1: zzzzzz   teen 2: yup   teen 1: zzzzzzssssssszzzzzzzzsssssssss  . . . and so on.

This type of exchange can go back and forth at least 30 times before some YouTube video draws one of the participant’s attention away.

We may observe similarites and differences among kids’ online and offline relationships, and attempt to draw some conclusions, but the cited study measured how the participants feel about their relationships. While this was by no means an exhaustive and detailed research project, it provides a springboard for ideas.

Here’s the link to the NYT blurb:

For Men, Stronger Online Connections

Here’s the original report from the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future at USC:

cdf-sexes-diverge