Women in IT 2004

By Sophia Smith April 16, 2004

Early in March, we (Adriana Lopez and Sophia Smith) participated in "Women in IT 2004", an event for high-school girls organised by the Edmonton branch of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) held at St. Joseph Catholic High School. The goal for this event was to educate young women about the benefits of a career in IT, and to encourage female students to enroll in math and science subjects.

We both talked a little about our backgrounds, how we came to Canada from Colombia (Adriana) and Britain (Sophia), and our current jobs as programmers at BioWare. After that, we showed the trailer for Jade Empire. This set the mood for some further talk about the tasks involved in making games and all the different career opportunities in this industry. Next, we demonstrated some of the gameplay for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, while encouraging the girls to think about the various parts that compose the game.

We ended with an exercise involving every girl in the room to design a game together. We all decided on the theme and setting for the game, and then the girls each chose the department they would like to work in. Each department had 15 minutes to perform a task to contribute towards the final design. During this exercise, many creative and interesting ideas appeared, including a superhero that could shoot condiments from his fingers, and an arctic adventure that involved collecting gems from a crashed spaceship while surviving on penguins and seals and evading the ravening abominable snowmen that we all know roam around Iceland!

We really enjoyed this day; it was a great opportunity to share information about our careers and our experience as female programmers. We hope that we contributed towards making IT more appealing and interesting to the girls by showing them the diverse career choices in the game industry and how much we enjoy being part of it.