By Janice E Metz, ETC Administrative Coordinator

On Monday, November 5th, the Entertainment Technology Center hosted a visit from the Creative Tech Nights program (http://women.cs.cmu.edu/technights/). 28 Tech Night Girls, 6 volunteers, Mary Windom and Carol Frieze were toured by ETC graduate students Alyson Szymanski and Andrew Moore. They saw the ETC facilities and were thrilled to meet everybody’s favorite robot Quasi!

The girls also got to help ETC projects as user testers, providing feedback while playing prototypes of their interactive experiences. The feedback from testing plays a large role for the project team as they create a game that is both educational and entertaining for people.

The Creative Tech Nights program is focused on exposing middle and high school girls to creative technologies and ETC alumnus Emily Treat played a large part in starting the program. Weekly workshops are taught by female Carnegie Mellon Computer Science students. Using computer animation, web design, programming, robotics and interactive media, they work to engage a future generation of women in technology.

The Tech girls had a wonderful experience at the ETC and are looking forward to another visit in the future. Thanks to Mary Windom, Janice Metz and everyone else who helped make this such a successful visit.