Girl Scouts to introduce game developer badge | Hacker News Reader

Girl Scouts to introduce game developer badge

arstechnica.com

291 pointssaidajigumi85 comments

I have a friend who is very active in guiding in the UK (a "Brown Owl", I think?!) and my first instinct upon reading this was to copy the link and paste it on her Facebook wall with a positive, encouraging comment about how cool it is.

I got as far as pasting the link and FB detecting what it was before I noticed the original title: "In move to pwn boys, Girl Scouts to introduce game developer badge". I didn't even clock that the first time, I just went straight from the IMO perfect title here "Girl Scouts to introduce game developer badge" to the body of the article.

I'm now in limbo before posting the link, having replaced the link title with the one here (I really like how FB lets you do that), and considering my positive comment a bit more carefully. It's a niggle, and I anticipate accusations of "reading too much into it", but that title gets under my skin and I think it's because it's misrepresentative - as though the only reason for doing this is to keep up with the lads and "show them what for!". Rubs me right up the wrong way.

[Edit: reading the other comments in here I almost want to delete this because it's a negative nitpick on the presentation of the article rather than, as others are doing, a right on "whoop whoop" about this very cool news, but I had to get it off my chest.]

Yeah, usually Ars Technica has pretty good taste when it comes to those things, but I share your sentiment on this one.

They really wanted to use the gamer term "pwn" and thats the best they could come up with...

It does seem a little crass. But perhaps it's not such a bad thing to stimulate a little bit of competition between the genders when there's a mismatch in the level of participation in a given field.

Competition usually invites antagonistic response. That's not really what I want to see.

Yeah, my reason for trimming the title on this submission basically precisely mirrors your reaction. I wanted to "whoop whoop" and share that with others, but really just grimaced at the original title.

http://www.girlgamer.com/zine/article/2677/

Too late for my wall post, but so obvious now you post it!

I think you may also want to see this in the context of the US, where the Boy Scouts are an extremely bigoted organisation.

"Extremely bigoted" is a pretty unfair way to paint the Boy Scouts of America.

Agreed, it's just women, gays, and atheists who are discriminated against by the policies of the Boy Scouts of America.

So "bigoted" is probably more fair.

I get the sarcasm, but I have to say it genuinely does piss me off if people consider hatred against gays or atheists to somehow be less offensive than racism or antisemitism.

The only real difference is the historical body count.

Don't you worry about devaluing the term "hatred" by throwing it around so lightly?

I don't know where you are, but my Troop has all of those. The national organization is pretty heavily Mormon, so that's an obstacle. But our Council just removed the rule against gay Scout.

And hey, the Girl Scouts are bigoted against boys, right? That's pretty disingenious; they are purpose-selective in accordance with massive issues with prepubescent youth. Pretty hard to mentor boys when they're constantly showing off to girls - try to change that!

Seems to work pretty well in countries that don't have different scout organizations for boys and girls.

I deny that; it seems implausible. But I have no more information than you.

What are you denying exactly? I am from Australia where they have mixed troops. Yes, it works pretty well.

You're right in that you have no more information about it than me. I spent some 8 years in such an organization so I probably know a lot more about it. It worked really well. Mixed troops are fairly common in the rest of the world.

Well, we have mixed Troops too, at the age of 14 and above, and its optional. But below that, a Boys-only club (and Girls-only as well of course) works pretty good for us.

I'm glad your experience was good. 8 years - so you must be an Eagle Scout? Or do you do that differently?

No, we don't have the concept of Eagle Scouts. We did have merit badges, but there wasn't much focus on getting them. We did spend a lot of time learning practical things that would help us on hikes.

Thank you, I did not know that and a quick google gives me plenty of links to start on.

It reminds me of when I was a "Cub", we had a couple of girl members and several female leaders. I didn't think anything of it at the time but I remember one lunch time one of the girl cubs (who went to my school) grabbed me (literally - she was two years older and bigger!) from playing football so I could tell a dinner lady who didn't believe that she was a cub. It was all in good fun but actually before that moment I'd never really got that one was for girls and one was for boys, I just thought you could choose freely. And, well, I suppose you can!

It's amusing that today, of all days, you are making this statement. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/us/boy-scouts-move-to-lift...

Still banning gay leaders, though.

I have a just-turned-nine daughter who came up with an awesome video game idea a couple of years ago - she is also a Girl Scout. She'll be so excited to hear she can get a badge for it. Of course now we just have to figure out how to build the thing! She's learning to code at the moment so anything that gives her more motivation to head to the Hacker Dojo with Daddy and her Chromebook and get her geek on is good news in my book.

Edit: from the video it looks like it is a bit restricted, but it's a starting point. Maybe if she builds one of these simple games and gets her badge it will encourage her to learn the more in-depth skills needed to really make the one she wants to create. Still a great idea.

Edit: hmmm trying it now with her and I notice that the first stuff is free but then you have to pay to get the full product. I hope this isn't another bloody affiliate revenue thing by the Girl Scouts - these effectively pay-for-badges annoy me. I already have severe issues with the while Girl Scouts cookies thing where they get only 15% commissions on a product that is twice as expensive as equivalent competing product and wouldn't sell at all if it wasn't for this free labor child workforce and the power of cute combined with guilt.

How can you even develop software with a chromebook? I though those were browsing/google docs only.

No it's a great tool for learning without going to the fully fledged laptop. She's able to work through codecademy training courses, tools like ShiftEdit and Cloud9 IDE are the next step. Tons of tools out there now for using a chrome book - maybe not for a power developer but for a beginner, particularly one who I don't want to trust with an expensive MacBook just yet, it's good enough to begin with.

"maybe not for a power developer"

I'd expect an actual "power developer" to be able to cope with any kind of environment! :-) A proper hacker should be able to make a Chromebook do virtually anything.

There's a developer mode to gain access to a shell, and it's also possible to use SSH or an online IDE.

Right. Ssh into a VPS and use vim is another option.

I am learning vim using vim adventures.

and now she's signed up for HN

Nitrous.io has a cloud IDE and built-in ubuntu server terminals with vim. If you tell them the 9 year old daughter story they'll probably let you skip the line.

That's cool - need to check that out - will take a look today. Thanks for the tip.

Remember the age poll and the <10 option?

http://beta.scratch.mit.edu/

Don't seem able to create a new account and sign in to the beta any more. Says only accounts prior to 1/26 :-(

Edit: Ah, luckily I set up an account I can rescue with an old email so she can use that, if she likes scratch, which I've still not really looked at yet.

I got a Scratch teaching comic book from No Starch for under $15 on Amazon. It's a bit much for my five year old but your daughter might like it!

Can you ping me a link - my username at outlook.com if you're worried about posting here and getting down voted :-)

Sure, here's a rot13ed non-affiliate link.

uggc://jjj.nznmba.pbz/Fhcre-Fpengpu-Cebtenzzvat-Nqiragher-Cebtenz/qc/1593274092

You guys are amazing. When I was 10, my father gave me a copy of K&R and told me "read that"

I don't have a chromebook, but I suppose one can develop browser apps/games running on the canvas?

Recently I started re-doing in HTML5 a game I initially was doing with C/SDL, and I am much more productive now.

You only need an editor and your game assets and you're good to go (for a simple game).

Unless, of course, Chromebooks are much more limiting than I imagine.

You can install ubuntu on a chromebook, I believe.

For her game, take a look at the Love framework. Lua is a fairly easy to learn language, and the framework is easy to use from what I've heard.

[1] https://love2d.org/

The library names are unnecessarily sexual -- "Hardon Collider", "AnAL", "LUBE", "Polygamy"...

That's disappointing. Thanks for the heads up. I never understand quite why some in the programming community don't appreciate how exclusionary their childish or sexist/sexually inappropriate behavior is.

"It's just a joke."

"Why should I have to censor myself for anyone?"

"It's a free country."

"I'm so tired of this politically correct society we live in."

"I'm a woman and I love dick jokes!"

And so on.

Most videogames are written by young guys with lots of programming experience, but little marketing experience. I'd guess they often try to use the code in these sorts of things to market to what they think is their intended audience. And I bet to some degree it works:

"Heh - it's called Hardon Collider - I should show my friends how funny this is!"

I'd wager that they think the group of people who will find this funny and share it is larger than the group of people who will find this obnoxious and avoid it. "And who cares about those uptight assholes, anyway?" In the end it becomes a very sad, tight feedback loop for these kinds of weird sexism.

>exclusionary

Online communities with a significant number of very young people tend not to be the healthiest ones.

What library names? I've never noticed that in LÖVE's docs.

If you click through the Wiki to Libraries, there's a list of them here: https://www.love2d.org/wiki/Category:Libraries

The examples Scaevolus lists are all in there.

Ah, interesting. And quite punny, given the foundations! But I don't think it's like anyone forces you to use the libs. I'd probably "go to the bedrock" (like the author of FOX Toolkit did) anyway if I had to write something on top of LÖVE. It's much more fun that way!

I'm the editor at Ars who approved the headline. I was ok with it because the Girl Scouts badge actually requires development work, whereas the Boy Scouts badge was just for game design. So it's not a matter of the girls "keeping up with the lads," but surpassing them.

Thanks for the feedback!

The headline "Girl Scouts to introduce game developer badge" is superb on its own.

No need to bash anyone else, especially when these two organizations are all about building people up.

Wasn't my intent to bash anyone. I just wanted to avoid a boring, eye-glazing headline.

> I just wanted to avoid a boring, eye-glazing headline.

The word is "factual".

This just looks like a great opportunity for awesome outside-the-classroom learning experiences and mentorship. I benefited hugely from various opportunities like this when I was young, but those were all based around local institutions versus the kind of broad-reaching impact that a Girl Scout badge can have.

I can easily see some girls looking over the list of badges, seeing this one, thinking "that's awesome, I want that one" and working to make it happen themselves. Beautiful.

I am coming from another culture, so would some kind soul explain to me how, in the 21st century, the society tolerates an organization called "Girl Scouts"? Am I the only one seeing something wrong there, as if there would exist "White Scouts", for example?

Does your culture have separate bathrooms for boys and girls?

So the reason of having segregated scouts is to protect their privacy? Wouldn't it be enough just to have one scout organization and separate bathrooms as well?

Privacy in bathrooms is accommodated through the use of private stalls. Why should you have privacy from someone with different body parts but not privacy from someone with the same body parts? What about transgendered people, or people born with a mixed gender? We all make the same body noises so if the privacy is there via private bathroom stalls, why segregate people?

Regardless of that point, the question was why "Girl Scouts" but not "White Scouts". Modern society frowns upon segregated bathrooms by skin color (look to the southern US for relatively recent examples of that) but not based upon sex. So just as there are segregated bathrooms for male vs female, there are also segregated baseball and volleyball teams, segregated schools, and many other examples where the division is by sex.

Maybe Scouts is one example where it should get with the times and there isn't a particularly good reason why it should be divided by sex, as could be argued for some sports where there are physiological differences justifying the segregation. However, I don't find it particularly archaic that a private organization exists which has separate groups for male vs. female. It would be archaic if only the female group has sewing, or only the male group has hunting, and if that is the case they should modernize those areas.

But it is a private organization and if people don't like the way the organization is run they are free to not participate. Anyone can start up their own private organization which allows members of either sex. Call it the Adventurers or the Pioneers, and have similar achievement badges. That sounds like a good idea to me.

I'm not sure how things are in the US, but I do know that in the UK we have the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides, and they both allow members of both sexes. But you do tend to get a lot more girl scouts than you do boy guides.

Here in Portugal we just have the Scouts, and they're unisex. Well, actually we have two Scout groups, the Catholic and the secular, but they're both unisex.

This is how you fix gender issues in the modern tech workforce; not after the problem has already taken root.

I'd think the best would be a mix of both.

There's certainly a case for both approaches though this one is probably most effective in making long lasting changes.

I'm not sure what this even means. Are you saying there isn't room for efforts like 1) pushing for better recruiting practices 2) teaching grown women to code?

I totally agree. If people want to complain that there are not enough female software developers, then start at the source, not the editorial page.

Give young girls role models that are not exclusively pink loving homemakers. This is one of the first notable steps in this directions I've seen and I applaud it.

Sounds good. The Boy Scouts introduced a similar one last month as well. http://www.scouting.org/media/pressreleases/2013/2130306.asp...

I was at the SXSW gaming expo last month and they had a booth about this merit badge at the event.

Very welcome. We need to change things, and the sooner in their lives, the more difference it makes.

Back in the 90's, I was an engineering student at Berkeley. I was bored eating lunch outside one day by the engr bldgs, & decided to pass the time by counting the gender of just those folks passing by. It was consistently 25% female. That includes non-engineers who were going up to the coops.

And, this is Berkeley. Nobody's going to (rightly) accuse them of anything other than liberal.

When your inputs are 75% male, your outputs are too. You can't put the blame downstream like that, & can't change it downstream as easily.

It's orders of magnitude easier to change this from childhood, early.

I ended up marrying a fellow engineer from Berkeley, & we are raising both our son & daughter to be passionate, curious builders & makers & coders. You don't just use the world, you adjust it & improve it.

This is so awesome. It's great to see programming penetrating the main stream and being recognized as a useful skill on all levels. I hope that we start to see more of our youth study cs and programming languages at earlier stages of high school and elementary school.

Btw the BSA has had a computers merit badge since 1967. http://meritbadge.org/wiki/index.php/Computers

Yeah, but it's mostly a joke, like most of the technical merit badges.

Burying the lead. The real interesting story is that previously the only science related badges were "science of happiness" and "science of style". Girl scouts: part of the problem.

What you did here was try to find the master list of Girl Scout badges and grep it for "science", which isn't even close to an accurate depiction of what the programs are. Incidentally: the implied dismissiveness of style is itself a gender bias artifact; we wouldn't bat an eye at the science of rockets or cars. You think there isn't science to dig out of cosmetics?

At any rate, a cursory search will dig up badges for entomology, botany, a bunch of different computer badges, science in general, human biology, engineering, and more. There isn't one handy list of all the badges all in one place that I can find; you have to actually dig into the programs.

(I'm the parent of an 11 year old girl, but she's not a Scout).

What I actually did was read the article linked. If it's inaccurate shrug, I don't know, but a googling of "girl scout badge entomology" doesn't show much. If there are and they're meaningful, super, I'm pleased and 'part of the problem' is revoked.

As far as "science to dig out of cosmetics", that's rather a non-sense question. Yes, there is science, good, hard science. It's biology and it's chemistry, it's not "beauty".

Yeah, I get it, the 'idea' is we connect things they're interested in to science. Well, IMHO, the problem isn't getting the girls (or boys) who are into style and make-up to 'dig' science, the problem is encouraging and networking the girls who do dig science and math. (this is already done much better for boys, again IMO).

If GS can embrace this then maybe they'll also embrace letting the Brownies collect payment for cookie sales using credit card readers and other methods besides cash.

They already have: http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Tech-tagalongs-boos...

Great to hear! My Boy Scout troops Computer Club was where I wrote my first computer program (yes it was Hello World :-)).

Fantastic but why just games though?

good for them!

Why video games, and not programming in general? Useful work is actively discouraged? Heck, there are tons of scouting-relevant apps one could make, around trip planning, navigation, information+-cataloging..

I love Girl Scout cookies. Great organization, and this is a great idea!

Smells like a PR stunt to be honest.

What's the stunt then?

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