"Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer" Pulled From Amazon

New submitter clcto writes Back in 2010, Computer Engineer Barbie was released. Now, with the attention brought to the Frozen themed programming game from Disney and Code.org, unwanted attention has been given to the surprisingly real book "Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer". So much so, that Mattel has pulled the book from Amazon. The book shows Barbie attempting to write a computer game. However, instead of writing the code, she enlists two boys to write the code as she just does the design. She then proceeds to infect her computer and her sister's computer with a virus and must enlist the boys to fix that for her as well. In the end she takes all the credit, and proclaims "I guess I can be a computer engineer!" A blog post commenting on the book (as well as giving pictures of the book and its text) has been moved to Gizmodo due to high demand.

Comments

LOL ... w00t?

[gstoddart]

Who does Mattel have in charge of Barbie these days?

Because whoever it is, has stepped in it so many times it's not even funny.

Are they being punked from inside? Or are people actually thinking this shit is a good idea?

Absolutely mind boggling.

Re:LOL ... w00t?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I don't think they're punking anything.

They are identifying empowering roles that could portray Barbie in a good light. Vetinarian, Doctor, Computer Engineer, etc. All the roles which are in demand, desirable, and have decent appeal to some set of the population. (I've been asked so many times how someone "gets" into my field, but as soon as you start off with the truth, that it is a lot of work, they drift away).

Then, they send these roles to their team of artists and storywriters who must do the minimal amount of research to put together the template driven "Barbie storyline". This typically means no understanding of the role she's in, strong emphasis on tieing in other characters, good dialog, a gatitous fun scene, and Barbie getting recogonized for her actions.

In the computer engineer role, obviously they misunderstood the role so badly that she gets recogonized for something they thought was admirable, when in reality (again you must learn the field to know) she's getting recogonized favorably for creating problems. To the educated eye, she's incompentent and the entire field would be better off without computer engineers of her skill.

90% of the time they don't botch the template-filling story creation this badly, but the heavy reliance of story patterns typically lead to Barbie stories that give you the impression it's all a big dress-up game. Barbie hardly does anything different, no matter what role she's portraying. I should know, I have a six year old daughter. 90% of the stories are innane, but at least the friends and "support networking" that she does has a positive message that is sometimes missed in other cartoons.

Re:I know this!

[i kan reed]

To be fair to that scene, it actually takes a bit of awareness to realize that fucked up 3d UI was a filesystem wrapper.

Like, "Oooooooooooooooh, there's /usr/, I get it now" was a perfectly reasonable reaction.

Re: OMG!

[hey!]

Waay back in the day when my wife was a grad student at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution by an odd fluke the sysadmins and programmers of the Vax/VMS systems they used for scientific data processing were women. Possibly their inability to grow beards disqualified them from Unix jobs. Anyhow, the nickname for them was "data dollies".

Of course there was a long, long history of women in scientific computing. The mom of one of my high school friends graduated from Wellsley during WW2 and worked programming the Harvard Mark 1 -- which meant (although I didn't realize it at the time) she must have worked with Grace Hopper. And of course there were the female code breakers of Bletchley Park. There were a lot of opportunities for smart women to do innovative things in WW2 while many of their equally brainy male counterparts were being fed into the war effort like scraps into a meatgrinder.

Anyhow, I don't think "data dolly" was meant to be as patronizing it sounds to us today. It was a cultural anachronism, like the drinking and smoking on the TV show Mad Men, which appears to us gauche but strangely fascinating. The common assumption back then was that even an intelligent, highly trained woman would quit her job when she got married to raise some man's children. My generation was the first to view automatically assuming that as patronizing. This new attitude was in its day called "radical feminism" -- which was a not too subtle way of associating us with Communists. But of course insensitivity is a two way street. A lot of older women felt insulted by the implication that they'd thrown their lives away.