Exploring the use of interactive narratives to engage inner-city girls in computational activities

The decline in the number of women in computer science and engineering courses is well documented at each level of advancement, and disparities are greater when considering minority women. Decisions about participation are often made early and have been linked to factors such as prior experience, interest, and sense of fit with community. To address these issues we developed Digital Youth Divas, a program for inner-city middle school girls interested in fashion and design to develop computational fluencies through projects tied to narrative stories. The Digital Youth Divas program intentionally fosters supportive communities and perceptions of girls and women as strong and successful as they engage in STEM learning and careers. Narratives have been identified as a way to engage youth in problem solving tasks, connect to real-world situations, and motivate positive STEM-identities. In this paper, we discuss our use of narrative stories in the Digital Youth Divas program to initiate situational interest—the first phase of Hidi and Renninger's four-phase model of interest development—and we share preliminary results of participants' learning and their interpretation of and reaction to the narrative stories.