December 1998 — Features
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The Cyber Sisters Club: Using the Internet to Bridge the Technology Gap with Inner City Girls
Some of the girls who had participated in a Y.E.P. summer session taught by a Visiting Scholar from the University of Puerto Rico sent brief e-mail messages to her via my account during this meeting. Unfortunately we weren't able to provide each Cyber Sister with an account and link them with an e-mail penpal, but this gave some of the girls a taste of e-mail communication. At the final meeting, the girls were very excited to see their own homepages, which could be accessed via the name buttons on the Club homepage. Each Sister received a folder with a certificate and a card with the URL of her personal page. They were encouraged to take friends and relatives to the local public library to show them their Web creations and to introduce them to the Internet. The role of the Internet as a source of information for school projects and papers was also emphasized.
The Snooker Scale
A technology attitude survey, based on an elementary reading attitude survey using the Garfield cartoon character was created for use as a quick gauge of the girls' attitudes toward using computers before and after the Club.[8] The scale uses a cartoon "Snooker" character with four expressions ranging from excitement to anger. The student is asked to circle which of the four snookers best matches how she feels about questions such as "How do you feel about using a computer instead of playing outside?" and "How would you feel if a classmate asked you to help him use a computer?"
The girls answered the six questions when they first arrived at Penn State and on the last day of the Club. The survey was given anonymously, which may be changed in the future so that individual comparisons can be made. As a group, the girls reported overwhelmingly positive feelings toward computers both before and after the club. In retrospect, the girls' answers may have been colored by their excitement and anticipation that first day as they walked into a high-tech room with laptops ready to go at each place with the Cyber Sisters Club page beckoning them. The students might have given more accurate responses had the survey been administered in their home school before they were aware of the Cyber Sisters Club. Hopefully we will be able to arrange with the home school for pretesting at the school for the next group.
On the other hand, one cannot rule out the possibility that the girls had genuinely positive attitudes toward computers even before the Cyber Sisters Club. Recent studies have suggested that girls' interest in computers rivals that of their male peers until age 11. Ages of the first group of Cyber Sisters ranged from 10 to 12, with many of them still within the age when reported interest is high. Comments and recommendations by other educators related to the scale are very welcome. The Snooker Scale, Internet Primer and writing prompts handout can all be accessed from the Club homepage.
At the end of each meeting of the Cyber Sisters Club the staff was faced with the biggest challenge of the day: persuading the girls to shut down the computers. It was very difficult on the final day to say goodbye knowing that the Cyber Sisters would return to an environment that offered little access to the technological tools they had worked with and enjoyed in the CoLab. It is hoped that the excitement that filled the room on Thursday afternoons will stay with the girls and motivate some of them to seek out technology in places like the public library.
