Designing Opportunities to Spark and Nurture Scientific Inquiry in Middle School Girls

This 13-page article discusses the impact of Click! Urban Adventure, an interactive game designed to engage middle school aged old girls with STEM skills. This article was authored by Kristin Hughes of Carnegie Mellon University, a member of the team that developed Click! Urban Adventure. As Hughes explains in the abstract, "The 11 to 14 year old girls who participated in Click! used the city [of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania] 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 science- based mystery."

This paper includes a background of the development and implementation of the game, a description of the game design process, a summary of what the development team learned, and a discussion of results and conclusions. As noted in the Results section, after playing the game, 93% of the girls had a high degree of confidence in their ability to use technology and 78% reported wanting to learn more about the technologies they’d encountered (n=84; 53% were minorities).