The garden is coming along nicely. Flowers spring into bloom in the herbaceous borders; mature trees are imported to cast their shade across the lawn. If only real life was this simple. But for Bernadette Carverry and Jessica Allen, both 10, designing a garden takes a matter of minutes, not years. Later they might switch to designing a room, complete with plasma TV, or a bedroom, with lava lamps and pot plants.
"I like computers," says Jessica, "you can design lots of things."
"I liked it when we got to design clothes, and do interviews," says Bernadette. "It was like something you see in a magazine."
The girls are part of an after-school computer club specifically tailored to get girls interested in what can often be an all-too-macho world of computer games and web design. Once a week they come along from their west London primary school to the ICT suite of the Sacred Heart High School in Hammersmith, an 11 to 16 maintained Catholic girls' school, for an hour or so of girly fun at the keyboard.
And it clearly is fun. Every computer station in the room is taken, either by the dozen visiting pupils, or by Sacred Heart students, and screens glow with bubble gum colours as girls run a rock concert, design a magazine or plan a fashion show.
"The target is girls in years six and seven. It's nice to be able to offer them something different," says head of ICT Niall Quinn. "They find it creative, and they are learning about ICT almost subliminally."
But behind the fun lie serious problems. Girls are perfectly happy to use computers as social aids, to chat with their friends or read e-mails, but they are not acquiring the heavyweight technological skills of using spread sheets, constructing databases and designing web pages.
more...
|
