Luci, Alex P & Cherie Visit St Saviour's and St Olave's School

Alex, Cherie and I recently visited St Saviour's and St Olave's, an all-girls school. The visit came about when Neriah, the very impressive Computer Science Prefect at the school, emailed Mm directly. Neriah’s motive was an interest in encouraging younger students to take up Computer Science. This is the kind of thing that really gets our attention at Mm :)

Our plan was simply to share our industry-entry stories and describe our roles for the girls in the hopes of inspiring them to consider CS at GCSE level and beyond. In our experience this is often all that’s needed, i.e. “We are women. We have some kind of CS or related degree and/or work experience. We do games for a living. You can too!”

We arrived to a classroom packed with lively and attentive young women. It quickly became apparent that quite a few were there simply because they love our games – which is fine! Anything that gets them in the room! We told our stories and the level of engagement was very high indeed – there was a palpable buzz, with lots of knowing giggles acknowledging the tricky bits of our stories, small bursts of applause for our achievements, ripples of surprise for things they hadn’t thought about and so on.

All this was fun and wonderful and inspiring for US, never mind the gals! But the best, most rewarding part came at the end, when a good dozen or so girls stayed behind to chat. Many of them revealed that although they’d come along just because they loved our games, they were now considering CS and/or a career in games! And one young lady told us that she had only turned up for a friend who couldn’t make it, but was now herself considering a career in games!

That right there is why we do this <3 <3 <3