| The girl on the left has some insanely big hair. I bet the other girls mock her for it. |
Until you hit that point, there's nothing quite as rewarding as earning a badge. My roommate, Ayesha, is a member of the Society for Women Engineers, and spent yesterday helping eleven year old girls earn their Entertainment Technology badge. Apparently, there's no better way to get girls interested in math and science than explaining, don't worry, math and science aren't just for solving important world problems and improving the living standards of mankind, they're also the same forces powering your powder pink Nintendo DS on which you're currently feeding a virtual puppy.
Here's some of the ways they got the girls 'interested' in 'math and science', as explained by the activities packet I 'borrowed' from Ayesha.
Note: I wrote this fully with Ayesha's permission. SWE is a wonderful organization not only because it takes my roommates out of the dorm on a Saturday morning.
Animate Your Own Artwork
This one sounded kind of promising. The introduction starts by explaining how a flip book works. Because the packet was written by engineers, it starts a sentence with 'Did you know' and end it with a period. Not a question mark. And after explaining in depth how flip books work, it informs the girls they will not be making flip books, but something called a thaumatrope. This is a thaumatrope:
| Because he is in quest of prey! Ha, ha, ha, gets me every time! |
You tie the things together and spin it really fast. The images blend. This is supposed to teach the girls how animation works. Unfortunately, this isn't how animation actually works, since all animation has been co-opted onto computers and even Disney says it won't make any more hand-drawn pieces. So what it really teaches the girls is that advances in technology will render all but the most skilled labor obsolete, casting them down into a pit of poverty they'll have to struggle all their lives to emerge from.
Also, the standards of children's film have gone way down
Video-Game Development + "Blue Screen"
I'm not sure what blue screens have to do with video game development. I think the main connection is that they couldn't get a film studies professor to talk at their event (those clove cigarettes won't smoke themselves, people!) so they had to settle for a CS professor who specializes in data management. The packet begins by proving it was written by a woman, since it asks "Does Superman and Batman actually fly in the air like you see in movies?". Obviously, an eleven year old girl would know by now that men can't fly. And neither can Batman. Next thing you know, they'll be asking "Does getting bitten by a radioactive hawk turn you into Hawkeye?"
The packet explains blue screen by warning the participants can't wear any blue, which is actually the favorite color of most girls who know that, like, pink is for babies. Good thing they didn't actually have a blue screen, even though I knew kids in my elementary school who could work one of those things. Instead, they had the girls cut out pictures of themselves and stick the pictures against magazine cutouts. Note: this also counts to the scrapbooking badge.
Create An Amusement Park
The packet tells us that there's a thing called physics that makes roller coasters work. But is there? To find out, a courageous team of girl scouts will create a roller coaster out of paper towel tubes, pieces of cardboard, and 'other available materials'. The packet instructs girls to start at a high place and make hills and loops, an task we all learned from Roller Coaster Tycoon. It normally ended like this:
| It always amazed me how a 4-byte NPC would wait in line for six game hours to ride this deathtrap without noticing the screams of doomed pixels falling to their deaths. Also, this is the real definition of entertainment technology, far as I'm concerned. |
After the girls test their roller coasters by dropping a marble down them, they get to vote on who has the best coaster. I bet that bitch Stephanie wins. Everybody thinks she's so cool just because she's already gotten her period.
Sound Waves
Sound counts as part of entertainment technology, right? Like, music is sound. Movies have sound. Sound is how preteen girls express their appreciation for Justin Bieber. And ears are how we hear sound, so ears must be part of entertainment technology, and therefore part of this badge. Right? It's not like we're stretching for ideas. We genuinely know what we're doing. .
According to this packet, an elephant's ears help make sounds from far distances sound better. According to Wikipedia, they actually allow the elephant to access low frequency noise while acting as cooling devices, which is close enough to what the packet is for it to not matter that the information they're basing their whole demonstration on is incorrect. The packet also tells us that acoustics are important to 'avoid room to room transmission' of sound. Living in a dorm, I can affirm that avoiding room to room sound transmission is indeed important, although eleven is pretty young for learning about those sounds.
Lab Tour
This is an excellent activity if your group is getting restless and you want to shut them up--the only material listed as 'Required' in the packed it 'Killick the AUV'. I'm not sure what Killick is, but I'm thinking murderous robot. The last item under 'Activity Instructions' is 'Vehicle demos--torpedoes, blinking lights, visual recognition, ect.', so my murder robot hypothesis is pretty well supported. And I'm pretty sure this is the part of the movie where Queen Bee Stephanie takes control of the murder robot and begins her reign of terror.
Come to think about it, that's the most entertaining use of technology we've seen so far.
Editor's note: Apparently, I wasn't supposed to keep the copy of the packet I took off Ayesha's desk. Does 'Can I take one?' not mean 'Can I keep one?'
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