Team Cooper Blog

It’s the second official Ada Lovelace day. Ada Lovelace was pretty much the first female computer programmer. In her honour lots of people are blogging today about women in technology.

So I’d have something to write about I actively went out to find (Googled) some female role models working in technology. Even though 2 weeks ago I couldn’t have named any it really wasn’t hard to find lots of women making a big impact in technology. I can now list a number of women who are inspirational figures, the most current on my list being Jane McGonigal. She recently did a TED talk that’s blown me away. She’s a games designer and she works for the Institute for the Future. She’s trying to work out how to make a link between people playing in virtual game worlds and the real world. I’ve been reading a Theory of Fun (by Raph Koster) and it discusses how fun is basically an evolutionary reward from your brain for learning something new, possibly useful. Jane feels that if the we can spend time learning how to fix problems in a fun, rewarding and engaging way in a virtual world then we’d get a lot of problems solved in the real world. The work I do is not exactly world changing, I justify what I do as creating entertainment, making people happy and ultimately I love it (who can say they love their work?) I find what Jane is working on very inspiring. I’m not saying Team Cooper will ever create anything as meaningful as Evoke just that Jane’s ideas are going to affect and inform everything I work on in the future.

Rebecca Jesson (Social Media Manager at Quba) and I have been discussing if it’s a faux pas to blog about yourself today. I think we’re women working in technology and our experiences are as valid as anyone else’s, so that said, for those that don’t know here’s a bit about me. I’m a creative person who has always had a love for science, my Mum was a physics teacher, my Dad a mechanic and I’ve grown up with a constant source of information of how stuff works. I’ve been working in technology since the mid nineties. I started as a web designer, I watched the boom and bust from a safe distance. I’ve worked as a Flash developer in E-Learning, a freelance digital creative, a web design tutor to NEETs and as a team lead in digital marketing. Now I help run Team Cooper with my husband Tim and we create fun Flash things. At the moment we’re going through a period of growth and we’re starting to think of ourselves more as entertainment developers. The public are consuming ‘casual games’ more and more as their chosen form of entertainment – so why not? We’re building on the success of Beastie Burgers by creating a Facebook version and follow up games, taking advantage of this up swell in the social games market.

Being a woman in this environment has never been an issue, ever. Maybe I’ve been lucky? I suspect it’s more to do with the industry being populated by modern thinking people who really aren’t bothered about what you are, just about what you can do. It’s noticeable in the office and at various events that the number of women is in the minority but I don’t think that’s from a lack of trying. I think I’ve probably experienced more positive discrimination than the other way around. The problem is getting young women to make technology a career choice in the first place. So I fully support Ada Lovelace Day and hope that someone reads this blog or one of the others being posted today and that they see positive experiences and role models to help them to make a choice to join in the fun. Happy Ada Lovelace Day everyone!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under Flash, Other, games. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.