Game Board & Double Bill

ON BOARD: For the past couple of months, we've helped create a bulletin board birthdays at the kids' learning center. Last month we had a Sasquatch skiing, the month before it was a scarecrow scene. This month, we struggled to come up with an idea, and finally hit upon basing it on the iconic Candy Land game.

I worked on making the game path (a whole bunch of colored squares), while Annabelle worked on characters. CJ did a lot of cutting out for us.

Below is a slightly blurry photo of the finished product. It measures about 6 by 4 feet, I think.

People's birthdays are listed on lollipops and fudge pops and the game playing pieces. 

DOUBLE FEATURE: Thursday evening, the four of us went to two movies. 

Initially, we were all going to go to Living Computer: Museum + Labs for their first Thursday documentary. However, a few days ago, I received an email letting us know Annabelle and a chaperone were invited to The Museum of Flight that same night for a free screening of "Hidden Figures," a story about women of color who worked for NASA as "human computers" back during the Mercury and Apollo era.  

So, Christian and CJ went to LCM, and Bee and I went to MoF.

I'll let CJ tell you about the movie they saw

 C♀DE: Debugging the Gender Gap is a 78-minute long documentary that, according to a press kit from the documentary's website, exposes the dearth of American female and minority software engineers and explores the reasons for this gender gap and digital divide. To put it in Layman's terms, C♀DE is a documentary about women and minorities in the software and coding industry, and many of the problems they face in their work environment.

I went with my dad to see the film on what was probably my gazillionth visit to the Living Computers Museum + Labs. Before seeing the film, I was told that it would be about women in the software industry, but I was not prepared to be as inspired or offended as I was by the end of the film.

In the film, we are told that coding is all around us, in our cell phones, our transit systems, our computers, and even in things like pacemakers (C♀DE does not specifically list those devices. Those are just what comes to mind when I think of important things that use coding in the modern day). According to the press kit, by 2020, there will be one million unfilled software engineering jobs in the USA. However, a disproportionately large number of software engineers in the modern day are men. Several cultural stereotypes, mindsets, misconceptions, and plain bigotry have all gotten in the way of countless women and people of color who want to get in to the software industry.

One thing I learned while watching C♀DE is that during the 1980s, many girls in American schools developed a mindset that being proficient at math (and more specifically, computer science) made you unattractive, and that only being "okay" at math and computer science (somehow) made you more attractive. If I remember correctly, this dealt a significant blow to the role of women in the software and coding industry, the effects of which can be seen to this day.

Also, it is very, *very* easy to get offended by some of the things seen in C♀DE (assuming you are not a misogynistic person). For example, at the 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon in San Diego, attendees were told a misogynistic "joke" in the form of TitStare, a fictional app revolving around looking at creepy pictures of women's breasts. Perceiving ideas and concepts like TitStare to be funny is probably a result of misogynism in programming culture, which had just reared its ugly head to the public view.

C♀DE is definitely worth a watch, and, assuming the link is not dead, can be watched online at http://www.codedoc.co/watch-the-film/ (Possibly NSFW. Contains strong language and sexual references).

 You can also watch the trailer: https://youtu.be/8VVb6M8pTvE
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I'll have Annabelle submit a review of "Hidden Figures" for tomorrow's blog post. I can predict with confidence that it will be a glowing review!