Mattel’s Game Developer Barbie is fantastic, says Casey Fiesler

Casey Fiesler and Miranda Parker did a wonderful remix of the original computer engineer Barbie (see Guardian article about that).  Great to see that Mattel did a better job the next time around, and Casey loves it.  I love the point she makes below, which echoes a concern I’ve voiced about open source software.

This is particularly important is because as much as we don’t want to suggest that girls can’t code, we also don’t want to suggest that coding is the only path to working with computers or games. Sometimes other parts of computing—like design or human-computer interaction—are delegitimized, considered less rigorous or less important. Or maybe they’re delegitimized in part because they happen to be the parts of computing where there are more women present (in other words, more inclusive), which is even worse.

Source: Mattel’s Game Developer Barbie is fantastic.