NSF grant funds development of a summer camp for middle school girls focused on designing wearable technologies to support social interactions in role-playing games

By Tim Stephens

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $1.2 million grant to a team led by Katherine Isbister, professor of computational media at UC Santa Cruz, to develop a summer camp for middle school girls focused on computational technology in a social context involving live action role-playing games.

The program targets middle school girls because that is an age at which many girls begin to lose interest and confidence in pursuing computing and technical subjects in school and as career options, said Isbister, who directs the Social Emotional Technology Lab in the Baskin School of Engineering.

“A lot of it is due to social influences, because children at that age are very sensitive to what is acceptable to their peers,” she said. “Computer science has become a highly gendered domain, even though it didn’t start out that way, and a lot of girls just self-select themselves out of it.”

Studies have shown, however, that girls can become much more engaged when working on coding projects as part of a computational community and when the projects are socially relevant, Isbister said. The idea for the summer camp emerged from her team’s work on ‘social wearables,’ wearable technology designed to support and enhance social interactions. The researchers have been working with groups engaged in live action role playing (LARPing), a popular type of fantasy game in which people create characters, make costumes, and act out various fictional scenarios.

“The LARP community is interesting because of their expertise in crafting social experiences and their attitudes toward technology—they will only adopt a technology if it enhances the shared experience of the group,” Isbister explained. “We thought this was relevant to the problem of getting girls interested in computing.”

Edu-LARP

The summer camp will use an educational LARP game as a sort of test bed for the development of social wearables by the participants, who will work together on designing and modifying wearable technology to support their social interactions in the game.

In designing the Social Wearables Edu-LARP (SWEL) camp, Isbister’s team at UC Santa Cruz will be working closely with the Game Academy, which has years of experience offering classes and summer camps involving role-playing games. The Game Academy will also be running the camp sessions.

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