Designing Selfhood: Incorporating Science and Technology into the Female Identity Through Narrative Immersion and Role-Playing

Abstract

Click! Urban Adventure is a collaborative, cross- disciplinary project intended to incorporate lifelong interest in science and technology to preadolescent and early adolescent girls. Research suggests that girls begin to adopt negative or failed attitudes toward these fields during the middle school years, while rejecting the qualities associated with these disciplines as part of their identities. The lack of desire and failure to incorporate the qualities associated with these disciplines into the female identity implies that the stereotypes that currently represent science and technology are unappealing, inappropriate, or lack resonance. Click! Urban Adventure is a narrative- based game that was developed in an effort to create visual, lexical, and behavioural languages that allow the girls to personally appropriate science and technology content through role-playing. Specifically, the roles played by the girls during the game were designed in order to influence the development of personal identity subsequent to the game end.