"Nitasha Tiku gets it right: games are the gateway to motivating girls (and boys too!) to get into the world of coding, game design, start-up culture, DIY, steAm (adding the Arts to STEM) and the maker movement in general.
I have been fortunate to have been beta-testing a "new platform called Beta" (
www.betathegame.org: mentioned in this article) with very interesting results: my 9th grade students at Dwight School have responded with a rare enthusiasm. The students worked over the weekends and over vacations purely through the self-motivation and a 'need-to-know' driven by the joy of learning.
Errol King, the co-founder and creative director of Hidden Level Games (which created Beta the game) and I were talking about what makes this platform (and game design in general) so potent as a motivator for kids: "god-mode" is the answer.