E.A.K. - Equipping Young Women with Digital Skills

About Solution

Most girls and women worldwide, think that engineering and coding are 'more for boys', 'too difficult' and 'boring' (Childwise research, 2015). Sadly, as our world is becoming increasingly digital it has been shown that the gender gap in technology is widening ('Why is the Gender Gap in STEM Widening?' Newsweek, 2017). In order to solve this problem, we are creating a product in a new market-EraseAllKittens.com (EAK); an online platform adventure game that inspires students-especially young women-to code, and teaches professional coding skills without pandering to gender stereotypes. Our EAK prototype (launched in 2017 and only available for PCs) effectively inspires young women to code by teaching basic HTML skills which can then be applied to create on the web. Solely through word-of-mouth, this prototype has 130,000 players in over 100 countries, and 55% are girls and young women-as opposed to an estimated 20% for other coding tools. 95% of all EAKs players want to learn more about coding after playing-this data has been collected via 12,000 feedback forms at the end of the game. In addition to this, (via beta-testing in schools) EAK has been shown to encourage young women, to become researchers, teachers, problem solvers, team builders, writers and designers, as well as coders. Due to it's highly gamified content, it also encourages collaboration amongst students-allowing teachers to become facilitators of autonomous, independent learning. Our aim is to build more 'Mario-style' levels, to empower students, especially young women, to learn HTML, CSS and Javascript-the languages of all websites and web apps. Our mission is to prepare young women for their futures in the 21st Century and to help close the gender gap in tech.

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