Last week, I attended the annual meeting of the GRAND (Graphics, Animation, and New Media) research network, held in Toronto.  Although the research and discussion presented and held at the conference spanned much more, the focus for me was on games and stories in games.

The presenter I was most excited about seeing was Jane McGonigal of Reality is Broken and Superbetter fame.  She believes that gamers are actually practicing some rather useful skills when they play.  For example, they learn to be hopeful and creative, two of several things that we should want people solving the world's greatest problems to be.  I reviewed her book a couple of years ago and still find that it influences my thinking on games.  Although I already knew most of what she talked about at GRAND (having been a fan for a while), I loved seeing her in person, and loved even more that my friends and colleagues now buy into her ideas as well.


A surprise for me was how much I loved Terry O'Reilly's talk.  I admit I'm not much of a CBC follower (unless they're airing an Ottawa Senators hockey game), so I didn't know who Terry was ahead of time.  He spoke about the power of stories, mostly with respect to marketing and advertising.  One of my favorite quotes:

Make people feel your message, not just understand it.  -Terry O'Reilly

Besides being an extremely good talk, it was fascinating how much I connected with his message with respect to games.  In particular, I found myself being convinced by him (and less directly by Jane McGonigal earlier) that stories can truly make a difference in learning with educational games.

On Tuesday night I presented my nicely designed research poster.  I was quite pleased to see a few other really great posters.  My favorite poster (possibly of all time) described Tiffany Inglis's research on pixel art in the form of a comic strip.  Check out the poster on her project page.

Finally, on Wednesday, the last day I was at the conference, I attended the Women in Games panel.  The panel featured Grace from Fat, Ugly, or Slutty, Cecily from Dames Making Games, Anita of Feminist Frequency (which is most recently focusing on tropes vs. women in videogames), and Brenda of Silicon Sisters, a women-lead game studio in Vancouver.  The discussion was fascinating, and I saw a lot of what I do with women in CS shine through, even though involvement in games can be much broader than programming/CS.  It was also really neat to see what Brenda and her company have been working on, since I had been chatting with Brenda about stories in games the previous evening at my poster.


Even though I had less than two days between trips (poor baby Molly!), and even though I could only stay for two days, I'm really glad I ended up coming to GRAND.  I feel energized as I move into my attempt to get a lot done research-wise this summer...

Blog posts have been sparse lately: I have been traveling.  Last week I spent five days in Palo Alto, California.  The visit was primarily for the Anita Borg Institute Advisory Board meeting, but I also had the opportunity to take a break from being a mommy and grad student (too often at exactly the same time) as well as visit and network with friends new and old.

The problem is, the more often I visit, the more tempting it is to live there!

The Advisory Board meeting was fruitful for the Anita's Quilt project.  I don't want to say too much yet, but suffice it to say I think the Quilt's stories have a bright and exciting future.  After the meeting I had the pleasure to join fellow board members Kathy, Kitty, and Carol (who hosted us).  Besides a most excellent meal, I enjoyed sharing what insight I could into Canadian politics and the like.

On Thursday, I had lunch at a tasty Italian pizzeria with my friends BJ and Valerie, both of whom I know through work with ABI and the Grace Hopper Celebration.  It was so great to catch up with them.

Thursday night I attended my very first ABI Women of Vision Awards.  As expected, it was highly inspirational.  I especially fell in love with Maja Matarić.  Without us realizing who she was at first, she had started chatting with a group of us in the pre-banquet reception.  She mentioned how she should probably wear some makeup even though she doesn't usually; otherwise, her mother (who was in attendance) might scold her.  So she pulled out the lipstick her mother had given her and put it on.  As another woman who never wears makeup, I felt like we might be kindred spirits.  (Her award speech was also absolutely incredible.)


Finally, on Friday, I met up with my friend Carlos, whom I met after a cold-email to tell him how much I loved his book Lauren Ipsum.  I visited him at Facebook, where he worked.  We walked around while we chatted, and although I got a great personalized tour of the Facebook campus, I was admittedly enjoying our conversation too much to properly pay attention.

I did take a few photos, though.  For example, this is the front entrance of the campus.  It is surprisingly nondescript!



There is a whole different look and feel once you step outside the lobby into the "walled garden." The aesthetic of the architecture, landscaping, and all the small details is really appealing.  You will also see a hacker motif showing up everywhere, but not in an obnoxious way.  See if you can spot it in the next two photos.

I made sure to leave my mark before heading out...


With all the wonderful people and beautiful places to live and work in the Bay Area (and that's not even mentioning all the amazing tech events to attend), it is certainly tempting to move down there.  But not to worry, fellow Ottawans: it's not going to happen anytime soon! Having family here is too important.  I do have to admit I am thinking it might be a good option in 20+ years when our kids are all grown up... ;)

I'm a strong believer in creating conference posters that look good.  If they have a striking resemblance to printed papers, in my opinion something has gone really wrong.  With that said, I have to say I had a lot of fun designing my most recent poster.

Although this image is slightly out of date from the final print version, it gives a good idea of what I was going for.  You can get the gist of the research by looking at it, but it does not contain all the information a paper would.  That's what the poster presentation itself it for: I will have the opportunity to discuss the work more deeply.

There is no reason whatsoever that a poster can't be both beautiful and functional, so I encourage you to see what you can come up with the next time you create a poster! If you have an example to something you're particularly proud of, I'd love to see a link in the comments.

Edit: You can now check out the high resolution PDF of the poster if you'd like.

Recently, I happened to start looking at some of the stories featured on the new Lean In website and came across Marissa Mayer's.  For all the interest and controversy she's drummed up in the news lately, I quite liked hearing her perspective on joining Yahoo! when expecting a baby.

Although she'd received offers like that of Yahoo!'s before, this time was different.  The company was a perfect fit for her experience.  But as she says, "...it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that I would or could make it work when I got that first phone call. At the time, I was pregnant, and I was thrilled."

Motherhood is an oft-discussed topic for women in tech (and probably women everywhere).  It can be difficult to be a pregnant woman among many men who don't necessarily understand what comes with that.  Equally daunting is the prospect of taking time off for maternity leave when you'd be one of the few to do that in your company or perhaps in your position.  (If there were more women in the field, it wouldn't seem like an uncommon occurrence.)

Mayer had been looking forward to a six-month maternity leave with Google, way longer than most Americans can even dream of.  By taking the CEO job, she would cut her leave down to almost nothing.  "The responsibilities were too big, and time was of the essence—it just wouldn’t be fair to the company, the employees, the board, or the shareholders for me to be in the role, but out for an extended period of time."

Did she find that motherhood has hurt her ability to be CEO?

I’ve come to realize that being a mother makes me a better executive, because motherhood forces prioritization. Being a mom gives you so much more clarity on what is important. I’m very close to my own mother; she has always been my most important role model. I’m grateful to her and to my father for a lifetime of their love, attention, teaching and sacrifice. Over the past five short months, my appreciation has grown for all parents, especially those balancing work obligations, because I know they have that same clarity of dedication and purpose.

Clearly, it's not an issue.  Granted, she has much money at her disposal to help keep her personal priorities.  However, families around the world have been figuring out many different ways to make it work for many years.  Money might make some things easier but it's not the only answer.

So can we stop bringing in the pregnancy and motherhood issue into discussions of women in tech (and other) companies? It's not like we ever do the same thing for men with young families.

Two recent Y Combinator graduates contacted me recently in an effort to recruit a female technical co-founder for their startup.  Although any awesome engineers would be welcome in their company, they believe that women are likely to better understand what other women would want in their fashion-focused product.  This is such a great example of why we need more women in tech — why should only men design products intended for women?

Here's a blurb about their company and info about who they are looking for.  If you think you've got what it takes to be a technical co-founder, I hope you'll give this opportunity consideration!

Join team StyleUp! A Winter 2013 Y Combinator-backed company, StyleUp is a Pandora for fashion. We are influencing the way people shop and get dressed every day and are looking to expand our engineering team. We are looking for part-time as well as full-time candidates. Tasks include (but are certainly not limited to) creating new product features, responding to customer feedback, and working closely with the StyleUp CEO, Kendall, a former Conde Nast fashion editor and MIT Sloan MBA '13, to shape the product vision and road map.
At 20% month-over-month user growth, the StyleUp system needs monitoring and performance improvement to ensure the best service and experience for our users. This involves writing code up and down the stack -- from database query tuning to front-end javascript algorithms. Having a performance-first mindset to all new features is a must.

If you are scrappy and creative, love working with fun people and get stuff done fast, we want to talk to you! Please send your resume to kendall@thestyleup.com.

A little about the technology stack:

• Python/Django stack with a MySQL database
• Front end using Bootstrap for CSS; jQuery/jQuery UI
• Hosted on Amazon EC2; deployment in Fabric and Boto (EC2)

On Saturday the University of Ottawa held its inaugural Go Code Girl event.  I designed the workshop's curriculum and taught the English section for the day.  I must say, it was a great success!

We started the morning with a general welcome session with the workshop organizer, then headed to the computer labs in two groups (French and English).  I had my group of girls "interview" someone they didn't know yet after introducing myself, then had them introduce each other.  It was really great to see what a big variety there was in their backgrounds.  Some girls came because their older sisters brought them along, others already knew they were interested in programming, and still others came because their parents made them.  All of these girls stood to benefit from attending.

As I often do, I began with a discussion of what computer science is really all about, and why women don't tend to go into it.  I usually do this with a younger audience, so it was great getting insight from the high school perspective.

The key points that came up were the fact that many girls don't know what computer science is (and how it connects to so many different areas), that it's easily seen as a boy's thing given the current gender imbalance, and that it is intimidating being one of the only girls in a large class.

Interestingly, the discussion focused from there on the quality of high school programming classes.  Over the years, I have been asking high school students what they thought of these courses.  Anecdotally, it seems that they are often not overly effective, particularly for women.  The girls in the workshop wished that the courses weren't just about programming, but rather used programming as a tool to solve more interesting problems that they actually care about.

It also seems that the backgrounds of some programming teachers is not even related to computer science.  In one girl's high school, the gym teacher also happened to teach programming; he didn't even bother promoting programming when they had a course fair for students.  This means that the quality isn't necessarily the fault of the teachers.  There just aren't enough computer scientists willing to teach! But that doesn't mean we can't train others on how to teach CS.  In fact, this is something I want to do as time goes on, similar to what Barbara Ericson from Georgia Tech does in her home state.

After our discussion, I had the girls download a finished Processing project.  It was a memory game I had created for a previous workshop and then adapted for the undergraduate game dev tutorial I was TA'ing for.  I told the girls I wanted them to play with the game, look at the code, and start finding ways to tinker with it.  I interrupted them every ten minutes or so and taught them a new programming concept (variables, boolean and if, loops, arrays and lists, methods, and objects).  After each concept, I left up a small snippet of code they could independently type in and tinker with to better understand the topic.

This was a new approach for me, but a few smart people had suggested it works pretty well (including Barbara mentioned above, as well as one of the creators of Processing himself!).  It supported the idea of just-in-time teaching, where we expected the girls to run into problems so we could help them learn something right when they needed the knowledge.

Did it work? Let's just say a mentor mentioned to me that one girl said she had just learned more about programming in the first hour of the workshop than she had in four months at school.  Sounds promising to me!

In the afternoon I had the girls choose a tutorial to work on where they were guided in making a mini-project of their own.  Every needed step was described, but not always completely explicitly.  Some of the girls struggled with these more than others, so it might be worth making an easier one for those who are less confident.

We still have some data to look at via surveys we gave at the beginning and end of the workshop, but overall I think the day was quite successful.  Huge kudos to Nathalie Vallières from the University of Ottawa who organized the entire day, contacting me as a potential instructor months ago.  I'm looking forward to this becoming an annual event!

Last fall, we published a paper about augmented reality, cognitive theories, and learning. I previously wrote about the design advantages of AR; these give insight into when AR is really the best choice for an interface.  The following is from our paper.  If you find it useful, be sure to check out the complete work on my website.

[Augmented reality's design] advantages can be used to decide whether augmented reality is a good interface for a particular type of learning scenario. The applications that most benefit from AR are generally those that make natural use of all four categories of advantages.

Virtual flexibility is inherently desirable in all digital tools and applications we design. Similarly, it is desirable to incorporate aspects of the invisible interface. We do not want our users to unnecessarily switch their attention between multiple artifacts, for example. We also often try to incorporate natural movements, direct manipulation, and gestures in our interfaces.

In contrast, not all applications need to make use of spatial awareness or even have an environment to align virtual objects in. For AR to be a good choice there must be a clear and meaningful relationship between virtual objects and the real world. This might mean that a virtual object is attached to an explicitly related object or location. For example, a digital label that describes the object must be spatially aligned to it to make sense. Or, the relationship may come from seamlessly integrating the virtual object into the environment. For instance, a virtual animal might be shown as though it were present in its real habitat, giving learners the opportunity to observe it. The cognitive theories above offer some suggestions as to where such relationships may be useful, such as when building new mental models or providing situated meaning to the virtual data. But if there is no good reason to associate the virtual objects with some aspect of reality, then AR is likely not best for the application.

Whether an application needs reality for free is also an important consideration. It is advantageous to make use of the real world when details found in reality are key to the application. Including reality as it is rather than building a virtual representation of it saves programming effort and reduces the risk that important details about content or behavior are left out. This can be critical when the application involves a task requiring specific behavior with real-world objects. When training for or performing surgery, for example, the exact dynamics, texture, and color of human tissue would be difficult to simulate, yet may be important to the surgeon.

Because virtual flexibility and the invisible interface represent goals we have for all applications, spatial awareness and reality for free offer the best insight into when to choose augmented reality over other options. If an application can't clearly take advantage of these, then there is likely a more suitable interface type, as is the case with abstract domains in which users do not interact with tangible, real-world objects or data. Instead, users work with virtual information (like data on a computer) or physical abstractions of reality (such as charts). When reality does not play a prominent role in the application, it is difficult to make a meaningful connection between virtual and real objects. For instance, some examples of AR artificially create a connection to reality by having users hold a specially designed card upon which a 3D model will be displayed. While the method of interaction allows an enactive approach to viewing the model, the same could be accomplished with fully digital interfaces that support natural gestures. It is not clear that augmented reality is well used for this kind of application.

On the other hand, applications designed to support learning tasks that are already centered on the real world can make good use of both reality for free and spatial awareness. Information or problem solving aids can be tied to the relevant aspects of the real environment, as for learning about car engine repair: virtual labels can identify components of the engine while visual instructions can guide the learner. It would not be as easy to do this task virtually given the physical changes made in the real world. The virtual objects have a clear connection to the engine parts in the real world. Many learning applications also benefit from these advantages when, for instance, real world context is important. For example, an application designed to teach photography could use augmentations to illustrate important concepts of composition, depth of field, and so on with visualizations overlaid on the actual scene being photographed. Though these concepts can be illustrated with photographs already taken, interacting with them in real time in the real world makes their context much clearer and helps build a much better mental model. For both these applications, AR is a strong choice.