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Google-Advised Disney Cartoon Aims To Convince Preschool Girls Coding's Cool
theodp writes: Cereal and fast food companies found cartoons an effective way to market to children. Google is apparently hoping to find the same, as it teams with Disney Junior on a cartoon to help solve its computer science "pipeline" problem. The LA Times reports the tech giant worked with the children's channel on the new animated preschool series Miles From Tomorrowland, in an effort to get kids — particularly girls — interested in computer science. The program, which premieres Friday, introduces the preschool crowd to Miles Callisto, a young space adventurer, and his family — big sister (and coder extraordinaire) Loretta and their scientist parents Phoebe and Leo. Google engineers served as consultants (YouTube video) on the show. "When we did our computer science research, we found the No. 2 reason why girls in particular are not pursuing it as a career is because their perception was fairly negative and they associated it as a field for boys," said Julie Ann Crommett, Google's program manager for computer science in media. Can't wait for the episode where Google and Disney conspire to suppress Loretta's wages!
Design shit on an iPad and give it to the "boys" to knock out some C# modules to slurp back DB2 recordsets for your shitty app. You go girl.
Comment on wage suppression is spot on. These fuckers are evil. There's an agenda here, like they know they can hire women at 76% the cost of a male.
It will work fine.
Perhaps someone could rename Ruby to 'Pink'?
They can't even get basic computer use or hacking correct in a $200 million movie. How are they going to accurately represent software programming in a cartoon? The computer will probably beep every time she types like some 90's movie.
Any industry White Males work in needs to be diversified.
Presently 12% of men older than 45 in the US, by US Census data, have never married and will never have kids. 1955 - 1995 that was >5%. Demographic is half poor, half in the 80th percentile of wage earners.
The trend is, about a third of Men in the US will never marry, never have kids; if you're in highschool in grade 8-12, chances are, one in three guys will never have kids or marry. Majority is white.
Japan - same numbers, they're presently at 25% over 45 never married no kids, about 50% of men will never marry, never have kids.
That doesn't include half of the children in this country are being raised without a father in home.
Keep up the great diversification work, the last time we had this many men without families was the dark ages. As those men age, they realize they have nothing to lose. This creates instability, you are creating a demographic nightmare that will cause a lot of people to end up dead.
I'm tired of hearing about this company and them being involved in 500 industries.
From the short description of the show what I get is that the boy is the hero (of course), and the older sister will probably solve stuff for him, but he'll get all the credit (what hero doesn't?)
Will they have the standard character stereotypes of the lovable, but well intentioned bumbling male paired with the more introverted, but take control female that seems to have permeated every other TV show?
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If you need corporate support to manufacture an entire cultural industry to prove something exists, it probably doesn't.
You wanna know why programming is thought of as a field for boys? Because to be really good at programming takes an almost obsessive devotion to honing your craft at a young age, and girls are far too social to spend their summers in front of a computer in the basement.
As a side note, this "everyone can code" stuff irritates the hell out of me. Yes, everyone can code just like everyone can play Chopsticks on the piano. But there's a world of difference between the coding that "everyone can do" and the kind of skill and breadth of knowledge required to land a job at Google.
Kids are going to feel disappointed and cheated when they realize programming isn't as quick, easy, and pretty like all the fun UIs in the show.
The Featurette on youtube didn't show any actual coding. It showed a bunch of MEL that's generated as the artist used the GUI. I am 99.9% certain that the artist didn't create the character in MEL and instead used the modeler tool. There's nothing wrong with that, but if they wanted to talk about programming, they could have shown some of the cool Maya plugins PROGRAMMERS created for the artist to use.
The best fairy tales have a true core, which is the reason people keep telling them. This is just propaganda.
Maybe most girls simply aren't interested in programming or firefighting or plumbing, just like most boys aren't interested in being fashion designers or makeup artists. Why is there such an enormous effort to "convince" girls that programming is what they're supposed to do? If any group of kids needs so much cajoling to get into a certain career path, maybe they just don't want to do that!
we found the No. 2 reason why girls in particular are not pursuing it as a career is because their perception was fairly negative and they associated it as a field for boys
Well, that's great, but if the No. 1 reason is that girls just aren't as interested in coding as boys (generally/on average) then how far are you going to get?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Or an episode, where she sleeps with journalist to get better review for her application... after all, this is not something which should be ridiculed or condemned, right?
...they do what you tell them to.
Girls hate computers because they don't do what you want them to.
It's called programming, ffs.
There is something creepy when a bunch of 20-50yo males sit round a table and decide how to sell stuff to kids.
...coding ISN'T cool. It can be fun, rewarding, and it can pay the bills, but there is very little that is cool about programming. If you have a group of people picking their future careers simply using the "is it cool" filter, then you can except to get very few programmers out of that group.
The two rules for success are:
1) Never tell them everything you know.
HOLYSHITFUCKIJUSTFIXEDTHEENTIREPROBLEMSWITH GIRLSANDCS! major idea bomb. so first observation, this goog initiative will fail, because kids don't want to be told what's cool. second observation, the secret to engaging with girls is through SMS. Subset observation, it blows me away that girls spend so much time on their phones because it looks like dorky boys with their faces in a game boy. conclusion. make a robot-style thing, like a roomba or something cutesy for kids. have somebody send controls to it by sending a text message to a phone number. then the kids can take turns controlling it with different commands to move around or watever. One step commands can build up to multi-step commands, all communicated to the robot through sms or imessage or whatever. shh don't tell the kids that they're coding!
Its time to force girls to code right? Diversity at all costs!
CAPTCHA: Dilute
So at what point does using kids shows to try to create interest in this topic cross the line from 'marketing' to 'targeted propaganda'?
I'm all for more women in programming, but I think they should come to it on their own rather than be indoctrinated.
Let people who love it do it, rather than creating more of the 'I don't like it but it pays well and I can always find a job' MCSEs of the 90s.
Every time some skanky slut fucks a journalist, a gamergater gets his wings.
What's with the current obsession on forcing women into computer science? We certainly shouldn't discriminate but trying to force anyone into a field they aren't interested in just creates a bad employee. CS is no super secret field shrouded in mystery anymore. Everyone uses a computer and knows were software comes from. If they are interested, they'll seek it out.
It would be about a little girl who can code, and has the superpower of not asking for a raise!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Just like "Swordfish,""Hackers," and "Sneakers" convinced every male that programming is cool. I know I wouldn't have considered programming until I saw these movies. Until then, I thought that programming was for nerds. But then, I imagined myself to be like Robert Redford in "Sneakers." Suave. Debonair. Computer programmers get chicks. Forget the guitar, I'm learning C!
Then I realized I was more like Dan Aykroyd's character.
Fact is, if these movies had any affect on males, it was to affirm that programming was something they liked, not convince them that they should become a programmer. Anyone who these movies convinced to try programming was sorrily disappointed when they realized that code is just reading.
I easily make over twice what the median income is in the USA, but at a cost. I put in a lot of time and effort to remain relevant having mastered three or four languages on my own. If I didn't I couldn't be employed as a programmer.
Women aren't dumb. It's sad to see a guy who didn't keep up his skills. He's the one carrying around the release sheet looking for people to sign off because that's what he was assigned. He's the one who hopes he can make it to 67 before they outsource or change technologies. He's the one that answers his cell phone at 2:00AM or at dinner time because a program stopped.
Programming isn't cool. But most jobs in this world aren't cool.
Have the cool kids be good at school
Have kids be unashamed about doing well in school.
If you must have a comic relief buffoon have him be good school
Do not promote ignorance and or stupidity as a good thing.
Why don't we teach girls that construction, driving a garbage truck, driving delivery and transport trucks, driving a snow plow, farming, and other typically male dominated jobs are cool? Why all the fuss about programming? I've talked to girls about CS and it just doesn't interest them... at all. When I was in school only two girls signed up for CS, and both dropped out after the first year because they hated it. Accept it, girls and women like different things than boys and men. Girls prefer to play with dolls while boys prefer to play with trucks and tools, etc. Women are great at marketing and advertising, project management, etc.
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in the future, it will be done by 'cheap world labor'. ie, NOT YOU. I see every day in the bay area; there are so few americans doing software work in silicon valley, that you only have to connect the dots to see that this field is QUICKLY DRYING UP and won't be viable for US based folks (who want to be above poverty level) in the future.
maybe 5 yrs, maybe 10 yrs. 20 yrs tops. it shows all signs of going to 3rd world countries who can 'think and work remotely'.
thinking jobs (or IP jobs) just don't make sense locally anymore. companies don't want to pay (in their minds, 'overpay') and I don't see this trend reversing (how could it? we are greedy capitalists and don't care for our fellow locals; and so since cost is ALL that matters, it WON'T be done in the US anymore).
so, putting your kids thru college for software? what a waste of time, money and disservice to THEM!
I hate this. I spent my whole friggin life being good at software and gaining tons of (what I thought was) valuable experience. but its not valued! only 'time to market, speed and low cost' matters. quality is a has-been.
sure, there are some counter examples, but being a bay area resident for over quarter of a century, I've seen this trend and its a very obvious clear trend to anyone who's been here long enough. there USED to be a good software job market here. now, its drying up and all you see in companies are h1b's! and soon, even those won't be viable anymore.
please, see the writing on the wall. save your kids the upset and expense of going into a field that has, by the time they are ready for it, dried up.
very sad. depressing. but lets be honest, here. we all see this, don't we?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It's 2015, and most of the egregious geek stereotypes have changed significantly. But, the development and IT industries are still very similar. Development is a very solitary experience, as is IT once you get out of run of the mill support. I know I've spent stretches of a few hours digging through log files, troubleshooting an intermittent problem, etc. by myself. Even with agile development, pair/team programming, and every other coding fad that makes people work together, there is a lot of time spent alone solving problems. I like doing this -- it fits my personality type. Do most women? Probably not; I'm guessing most would rather be in social situations. Do some? Sure, I've worked with a bunch.
Being married to a female, and now having a daughter, I can safely say that men and women are very different creatures. I think women self-select out of IT and development mainly for the following reasons:
- Perceived lack of socialization, and yes, the nerd stereotypes are still there to a lesser extent.
- Especially in workplaces that suck, the work/life balance is screwed up. My wife and I both work, I'm in IT and she's got a corporate finance job. We are both incredibly lucky to have good employers who don't death-march us on a regular basis. I know many more people who don't have this luxury. If you're female, and are wired like most females, you will want to take care of your children more than spending extra hours at work. I feel that way too, and this is coming from someone who really loves my job and loves digging into strange problems.
- Women are smart, and they see the writing on the wall for the IT/dev industry. Now that it's "easy" to program an application for a phone, and more aspects of systems management are automated, there will be an inevitable reduction in employment and salaries across the board. These days, you really have to be on top of your game to stay employed at the higher salaries, and be constantly learning. There are a lot of jobs that have less of the constant retraining, are more stable, and have a better balance.
- Especially in the SV startup/web/social media sphere, the rise of the "asshole brogrammer" stereotype as evidenced by many stories all over the tech press might be scaring women away too. This is kind of the opposite end of the nerd spectrum -- now that development is open to more people, the more extroverted fratboy types who got through CS are founding startups and getting themselves into sexual harassment trouble.
Do I think any of this encouragement works? Not really. I think what would work is to keep developing girls' logic, problem solving and math skills at an early age. Those who excel at these and can handle all the other crap that comes with an IT/dev job will gravitate toward it. Others won't, and we just have to live with that.
Well, there actually are things to be said in favor of the exception, provided that it never wants to become the rule. - Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science
>> in the future, it will be done by 'cheap world labor'. ie, NOT YOU.
I call bullshit. I've worked in several comapnies that have each tried outsourcing software development projects and without exception they've ALL failed due to bad quailty. Thankfully many if not most US companies are finally deciding that outsourcing software development as a cost-cutting exercise just doesn't work.
if we can get women coding, the pool of applicants is much larger and we don't have to permit more H1-B visas to get that effect. Which is great for our financials.
which reminds me, I thought their motto was "do no evil"?
You know, this could be part of the thing. Girl dominated professions are traditionally cheaper than boy dominated professions. Teachers make less than coaches, cooks make less than chefs, as programming becomes girly, it will pay less.
Or I could be filled with apophenia.
and I asked her how she felt about how there are few women coders, and surprisingly her answer was that she was happy with that because she enjoyed working with mostly men, because she "could avoid all the cattiness and emotional bullshit" and just concentrate on work.
Maybe we should focus on recruiting just the lesbian part of the female workforce then? ;)
Sent from my ENIAC
Just a ploy to continue to drive wages down by increasing the worker pool.
Seems to me that having the parents both be scientists defeats the purpose. If you want to appeal to most girls, I'd think you'd want to have a more "average" family, not show how daughter of scientists does sciency stuff. Maybe show how daughter of wage workers helps solve family/work problems by coding. For example, my first useful coding job was a score-keeping program for my mother so she didn't have to do it by hand for her entire bowling league.
To me the effort sounds pretty badly done, the female coder being in a secondary role? How is that supposed to convince anyone coding is cool? It seems more like a prep job for a life where you are a mad coder - who has to work for Miles clones running the actual business. Thanks for the indoctrination video Google!
I say that as someone who thinks that solving the problem of too few women interested in computer work being the real issue that needs fixing. I don't see this helping in any way.
Young girls need to understand that learning to code is great idea, because it opens you up to a life with much greater freedom than most other professions...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And provide a little training to experienced programmers who want to learn new skills. Their faux shortage of experienced, competent programming staff would disappear in a year.
Of course, this is beyond the comprehension of a newly minted MBA or HR director. They want money-saving flashy miracles that will get them their next bonus in the next quarter, before they move on to avoid the next re-org. Solving problems is irrelevant - to be avoided if it interferes with the next crazy bonus scheme and all of its unintended consequences.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
sjw(s) don't care that few girls are writing code per se, they don't like that men are heavily disproportionately sucking down the "top it talent" salaries & ipo kaching! the field's always been like this - what's changed is in the 90s you made mid 5-fig keeping mainframes or lan(s) up for fortune 500 corporations versus now you get paid 6 to whip out a facade for companies that have no prayer of ever being cash positive but gets sold for 10-11 figures. THAT got people's (unfortunately including the sjw[s]) attention!
20 years ago. With how accessible programming and free training / tutorials available at the touch of one's finger tips....the excuse women don't have enough encouragement is wearing thin. ....I think the majority of women have spoken, they would rather do something else (none of the women I have worked with have stayed in development, ZERO, they either move on to upper management or leave the workforce all together to have kids....why is this such a big deal?
Coding small programs for fun is cool.
Coding real programs that must work 99.99% of the time isn't cool. It's a tough and responsible job few are actually capable of.
Stop spreading this bullshit already.
If Disney and Google want more women in CS (not a bad goal), funding scholarships and coding camps would go further than a cartoon aimed at kindergartners. Showing a mythical face to the real tasks of coding won't help push anyone into the field any more than the lawyer and medical drama shows push kids into law and medicine. Summer camps for girls and women who enjoy math and logic and help them take it to a practical level by learning to code, or lowering the financial barrier for eager women students would pay more dividends than a shotgun approach to all kids.
Top IT Workforce Percentages
1) Males
2) Females
See, females are in the top two positions. That's really good. I don't think we should be concerned until they drop down to 6th or 7th place.
I think it's going to get harder for women in IT careers. There's more and more Indian IT workers and they're far more restrictive and dismissive towards women than the general USA population. You wouldn't want to stay in a career where you're always ignored or your ideas are dismissed and instead implemented when proposed up by a co-worker.
that it could pay a lot of money. By the time it was offshoring and the H1-B visa program had eroded wages to the point where it wasn't true anymore (save a few math geniuses working for google/wallstreet). So once again it's something you do because you want to, which almost always pays like shit.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
1 Disney has a rock-solid reputation for doing popular science right. Man in Space, Our Friend the Atom
2 The studio has become scarily good at creating strong female characters and casting them in non stereotypical roles that win over male and female audiences of every age.
3 It has been wiling to take on high-risk projects with serious geek cred. That do not crash and burn at the box office because they reach out to a much larger audience.
Wreak-It-Ralph, Guardians of the Galaxy, Big Hero 6.
A cartoon that programs kids to think suing for civil liberties infringement is cool, that blowing the whistle on government projects and crime is cool, and getting rid of capitolism is key.
obamasweapon.com
you can call BS all you want.
when I first moved to the bay area, americans could find jobs in software. I saw more of a balance in the workplace back then (25 yrs ago).
today, I'm telling you (come here if you don't believe it and get a tour of any bay area software company) - its few and far between to find a US born person walking the halls or in a conference room (exceptions would be for upper mgmt; but first line mgrs are practically all foreign born).
deny it all you want. I live here, I see it and its a verifyable fact.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Penny was super cool.
But Hollywood made computers feminist-friendly 10 years ago. The nerd on "Jurassic park" was a girl (in the book it was her little brother). The nerd on "The net" was a woman who didn't leave her house for a month. Can't you see little girls demanding to be that sort of woman? What about a Tom-boy cop that joins a beauty pageant? Boys definitely don't do that.
Half the people I know are programmers and yet it seems like everyone is trying to get everyone else to code these days. Why?...and who doesn't think coding is cool?
Funny how boys apparently don't need to be "convinced". I am so sick of this forced diversity stuff, be it gender, race or otherwise.
Fortunately, things go wrong more and more when you reduce IT costs too much. Just look at Sony. We will also see a raise in companies, especially banks, that fold because they had more than a few days of IT outages. I know of several banks that are close to the brink and cannot tolerate 3 days of outage. Some of them already had full days where nothing worked and the reasons were just ordinary screw-ups, not anything complicated.
Girl culture doesn't find coding cool and never will. You're going to have to create a subversive counter culture that is contemptuous or indifferent to mainstream girl culture... and then indoctrinate as many girls into it as possible.
Don't like the terms? Fuzzy wuzzy them up if it makes you feel warm inside. But that is what you'd have to do... unless you want to just accomplish nothing. Which is fine too I guess so long as you stop wasting taxpayer dollars to do it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
There is a "shortage" the same reason there is a chronic "shortage" of doctors and nurses here in the public sector. They do not find locals willing to work for the pittance they want to pay.
Steve Pinker has documented that across all recorded societies, there is a pattern of men being more interested in things, women in people, thus eliminating the idea that this difference is caused by society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
Programming and IT in general are definitely on the extreme thing end of the spectrum, and thus attracts less females, and will continue to attract less females in spite of Disney and Googles "noble" efforts.
Ahh I was (incorrectly) presuming you were talking about offshoring.
I agree that more first gen. immigrants are coming into software within the US.
As long as they are truly competing on an actually level playing field (i.e they don't get concessions over locals and any other artificial advantages in the hiring decisions) I don't actually see that in itself as a bad thing. The real question is, is it actually level?
Don't forget that the US was built by and is mostly comprised of families that were themselves immigrants only a few generations ago.
I note all these comments about whether or not girls are "interested" in it. But: 1. do you know WHY some may not be interested? Are you absolutely sure that cultural factors have nothing to do with it? 2. perhaps more importantly, there are some who ARE interested. Do you agree that a discrimination-free (actually meaning, "same as what 'boys' get") environment should be given to them? You better. 3. assuming someone is not interested because they are a girl, no matter what you think about how many or few are interested, and then acting on that assumption, is a form of discrimination/prejudice in its own right. Do you agree? You better.
Right? No not literately. besides the bottom of the programming market is about to fall through once the rest of the worlds children catch up. It looks like they were about 10 years behind in having kids grow up with computers. Those days are long behind. I fucking hate techogly in grade school, give them paper and penicls and have them write and do math for years in-till they are masters at it. That is all. Does anyone realize there are about a million other jobs besides programming? Does anyone realize 99% of companies use the same software?
Programmers who got their first computers as adults don't exist. If you were a real programmer you'd know that.
So where did the first computers come from?
They were built by people most of whom are dead now. Their programmers likewise no longer exist.
That depends on what you call a "computer". If the end user cannot program a digital device, is it usefully a "computer" in the sense of a tool to prepare for a coding career? A microwave oven, by this measure, isn't a computer. Nor is a video game console or an iDevice. It's plausible to reach 18 even in today's connected world while owning only such locked-down devices.