What a great find! A website designed to encourage smart girls to use their smarts for fun and adventure. I hope you can check out their website. Mary Flanagan is the creator and she proudly features multi-cultural characters and ignores the typical girly girl stereotypes. Very nice adventure game. I would think girls in grades 3-6 would really like the site. There is also a great resource section, experiments, math games and other activities on the site.
Here are some excerpts from their homepage and their FAQ section:
The Adventures of Josie True is a web-based historical adventure game for girls. The hero of the game is Chinese-American Josie True, a regular girl who becomes involved in intrigue across time and space as she tries to find her inventor-turned-teacher Ms. Trombone. She time travels with one of Ms. Trombone's inventions,the Intellicat .
During their travels, they meet a host of historical figures including women from history such as Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman pilot. At each stop in the journey, there are fun, rewarding activities to play in order to find Ms. Trombone, stop the artifact thieves, help Bessie Coleman at her airshow, and much more!
Q. Why are you giving the project away for free?
A. This is a conscious choice before we even started the project. This is a not-for-profit project funded by the NSF--it is designed so that girls will be able to get involved in the Internet and in science and math educational opportunities for free. We want to give real girls good content and provide real historical role models to girls in a science and math context. There is too much money at stake in the software industry for developers to take (what they perceive as) market risks; unfortunately, that means that we see less diversity in the products available to girls. In addition, software is too expensive for the average family or the average school, and since the project is funded, it should be in the hands of as many people as possible. So send friends and family our way!
