Educational Technology

December 8, 2014

Barbie should break the geek ceiling

Filed under: Educational Technology — admin @ 12:40 am

by Chicago Tribune

Q:How many young women does it take to design and program a computer game?

A. None. Only boys know how to do that.

This, believe it or not, is the message to 4- and 5-year-old girls in the Barbie book, “I Can Be … a Computer Engineer.”

Written for beginning readers, the book tells the tale of a teen Barbie who is creating a computer game but crashes her laptop. She immediately gives up on the idea of solving the problem herself. Barbie also confesses to little sister Skipper that she can’t write software code. “I’ll need Steven’s and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game!” Barbie says.  The Barbie book, published in 2010 and available on Amazon.com, has taken a recent pummeling on the internet as misogynistic trash. Amazon last week showed 165 reviews–148 gave the book one star. One critic created a website called Feminist Hacker Barbie that invited contributors to, er, revise the book’s message by rewriting scenes.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2014/12/02/barbie-geek-ceiling-372/

Share on Facebook

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress