Girls In Tech

Associate Dean Magda El Zarki of UC Irvine's Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences is now the Executive Director of the newly established Center for Computer Games & Virtual Worlds.

It’s a Far Cry (pun intended) from digital circuitry design and electromagnetics, but Dr. Magda El Zarki, professor of Information and Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, will head up UC Irvine’s Center for Computer Games & Virtual Worlds.

By next fall, UC Irvine will open admission to 50-100 eager students who will be able to declare a four-year major in Game Science. With access to a 4,000 sq.ft. cyber-interaction observatory, students will study everything from anthropology in virtual worlds to brain-computer interface sciences. If you are not a student, don’t fret, the Center will open its doors to visiting scholars, offer workshops, and partner with other virtual world and computer game science centers worldwide.

Though the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds will focus on research and development, companies like Irvine-based Blizzard and French-based Ubisoft, creators of the Far Cry series, will eventually have access to employees with degrees in game science giving the gaming world a bit of needed legitimacy.

Since the UC system just closed its application process for Fall 2010 on November 30^th, be ready for the following year when the cyber observatory will open its doors!

Tags: game science, gaming, GIT, Magda El Zarki, UC Irvine, Virtual Worlds
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In reading about and viewing videos of Wolfram Alpha and reading about the life of the inventor, Stephen Wolfram, I am excited for him and his invention. I am excited that children will now have a plethora of history, data, and projections at their fingertips. Yet, at the same time it strikes a sour chord of lost opportunities. How do we, as a community of experienced women and mothers with similar experiences, make sure our girls—in particular—are given the opportunity of genius?

I think back to when I was a three-year old girl in the early 70’s without internet, encyclopedias or rocket scientists as parents, my commentary about molecular structures was, unintentionally, dismissed. I remember just knowing that things were made of smaller particles. I had no name for them, but I recall telling my mother on repeated occasions that things were made of “dots on top of dots” until one could see them, and that water had less dots than the furniture and that the air had even less. I did this until one day my mother, tired of my dot theory, exclaimed, “This is a chair! It is wood! This is water! This is air! There are no dots.” The sad reality is that it was not until middle school that I learned of atoms and molecules—lost time and lost learning.

By age sixteen, the 80’s hadn’t progressed much further for girls being seen as inventors. After being symbolically chosen to present at a Science Symposium, my teachers disqualified my thesis that students’ test scores could increase if they listened to classical music while testing. I assumed that they would less likely be distracted and they would become calm and focus better. The teachers claimed if students’ scores improved that I could never prove if students were performing better on the account of music—though the point was to participate in scientific reasoning and possibly spark further research—something the boys were encouraged to do. I never presented; but, ironically years later, UC Irvine researchers discovered that students may actually perform better if they were exposed to, you got it, classical music while learning—coining the term the Mozart Effect.

Fast forward to the late 90’s: What if the processing time of learning could be reduced tremendously (by up to 90%) by tapping into emotional experiences? I conceptualized a learning technique that was the equivalent of the Suez and Panama canals for learning. I mentioned my thoughts in educational circuits. Yet, again, I was met with the same disbelief and discouragement, because I was “just a mom.” So, I set out to get my teaching credential and master’s in education to prove my theory. After seven years of case studies in every grade-level, every economic level, and figuring out how to monetize my concept, I went to funders and pitched. Divorced housewife, mother of three, never worked except as a teacher—dismissed…“Go see Oprah. Maybe she’ll help you.” Well, I hadn’t really thought Oprah had an office in Menlo Park and if I were a man? All things being fair, I guess I would have been told to go see Dr. Phil. But anyway, needless to say, my experiences have allowed me to have an open ear and help develop my students’ theories on life.

For now, it is just wonderful to be in the bosom of women who think, who create, and who believe that their minds and bodies are worthy of attention. But, how do we as the GIT community of women take stake in hearing the voices of our girls when they speak of things that have yet to be created, like the Wolfram Alpha? How do we create a guaranteed platform that will, successfully, develop their genius?

Tags: Girls, GIT, Mozart Effect, supporting, UC Irvine, Wolfram Alpha
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