Designing opportunities to spark and nurture scientific inquiry in middle school girls
Kristin A. Hughes · 2005
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright © 2005 AIGA | The professional association for design. Our project, Click! Urban Adventure, was designed to immerse middle school girls in an interactive, mixedreality game that provides them with the tools they need to learn discipline-specific science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills. The 11 to 14 year old girls who participated in Click! used the city as their game board and STEM components as their tools. As part of the game, the girls take on the role of Click! Special Agents as they think, talk and reason their way towards solving an environmental sciencebased mystery. Our research team worked carefully to reshape the conventional framework of formal education and apply it to the landscape of everyday experiences. Click! was designed to show middle school girls, often underrepresented in science and technology, that understanding the world through a scientific lens can be stimulating, relevant, contextual and rewarding [2].