Written for Ms. Magazine and published online at Exelauno.Co

By Eve Weston

Earlier this year, blockbuster Hidden Figures brought to movie theatres the true story of African American women whose brilliance in math helped NASA win the space race. And it brought to our collective attention the difference between perception and reality: the disparity, for example, between our image of what computer scientists look like – Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates – and what some very important computer scientists actually looked like: women. Jean Jennings Bartik, Grace Hopper, and Hidden Figures’ Dorothy Vaughn were all pioneers who played a crucial role in the early days of computer science. And yet, despite their groundbreaking contributions, women today make up only 25% of the computing workforce. This shortfall also extends to other STEM occupations. Women are 57% of the total U.S. workforce, but only about 26% of those working in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. 

Given this state of affairs, it’s encouraging to see women clamoring to contribute to the burgeoning field of Virtual Reality and using VR for education, specifically to democratize STEM. Female founders of VR companies Code Cubes and Codon VR are paving the way for the next generation – and their own. Akshaya Dinesh, a junior at North Brunswick Township High School, is co-founder of Code Cubes, currently in the development and testing phase. While working with Girls Make Apps to teach middle school girls to code, Dinesh noticed that even with kid-friendly visual programming languages – like MIT Scratch – some kids still found it too difficult and quit. Dinesh and her now-co-founder Yasmeen Roumie, a former NASA intern and freshman at Fordham University, decided they wanted to inspire more girls to pursue computer science by creating a program girls would enjoy. On their drive to Technica, an all-female hackathon at University of Maryland, they came up with Code Cubes – a three-dimensional version of MIT Scratch with increased interactivity and character development – and built it that weekend.

Renee Van den Bosch’s company, Codon VR, is named for a different kind of code: genetic. Herself a biological sciences major, Van den Bosch designed and created Micro Cosmic World, a VR experience which is “as if an anthropologist were looking at humanity.” When participants move their controller over any object – an atom, an ant, milk – they’ll see a description, just like in a museum. Participants can move throughout the space, see objects from different angles, and pick things up. Van den Bosch’s ah-ha moment came when she was tutoring a student in biology and asked, “What’s larger an atom or a human cell?” The student had no idea. Van den Bosch wanted to make the answer obvious to everyone, which is exactly what Micro Cosmic World will do when it hits the STEAM and Oculus Stores this spring. Participants will get to interact with the world on various scales – that of humans, ants, pollen, and bacteria.

“Imagining things that are much bigger or smaller is a very specific spatial skill,” explains Nora S. Newcombe, Ph.D. and Professor of Psychology at Temple University, going on to say that, “Boys are better than girls at some spatial skills.” She emphasizes “some.” There are two broad classes of spatial skills, one involves sequential views of the spatial world, the skills required for map-making, the other involves understanding in your mind what you could do with an object in the world, for example, mental rotation, which is the ability to picture in your mind what an object would look like if you turned it on a different axis, or took a cross-section of it. Dr. Isabelle Cherney, Dean of the School of Education and Social Policy at Merrimack College, notes that, “The mental rotational task has been one of the ones that has the largest sex difference with men outperforming women in almost every case.” This could be worrisome, as spatial skills predict later science achievement.

The good news is that this difference isn’t permanent. “Despite the fact that people think they can’t improve, you can improve,” Newcombe explains, “We know that from a lot of different training studies.” Cherney’s research comprises some of those studies. She’s spent the past fifteen years studying gender differences, the implications of gender differences on STEM careers, and mental rotation in particular. In one study, Cherney discovered that one hour of training on the Nintendo Wii eliminated the gender difference in mental rotation tasks. While that doesn’t necessarily speak to long-term effects, Cherney is optimistic, “If with one hour of training you can eliminate something that’s so robust, there’s hope.”

Simply interacting with objects in 3D helps improve spatial skills, but Newcombe and Cherney agree that, in order to get women to play, “It has to be something that they want to play with.”, Luckily, as women themselves, Van den Bosch, Dinesh and Roumie know their demographic well. Whereas some virtual reality games have a male, “gamer” aesthetic, Micro Cosmic World has a sleek, modern aesthetic. It is, to put it succinctly, somewhere you’d like to be. This is not insignificant. Studies have shown that while men show no preference in learning environment, stereotypically male environments do deter women. Girls are also affected by the nature of the task and more likely to do something nurturing. “Girls look longer at people’s faces,” Cherney explains, “So there is already maybe a predisposition to some extent to be more relational for girls and more related to objects for boys.” This is good news for Dinesh and Roumie, who describe Code Cubes as, “kind of like you’re directing a movie. Everything’s really immersive. All the characters come to life right in front of you.” By dragging and dropping blocks of code, a participant can make characters interact with herself and with each other.

The use of virtual reality in education is just beginning. “Really, we’re at the dawn,” says Psychologist Skip Rizzo, Director for Medical Virtual Reality at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, “We’re such visual learners but we demand people try to learn things from abstract visualization and maybe you can get better effectiveness when people can kind of see representations.” Virtual reality allows for this, and more. Inviting and interactive environments where young women can explore the sciences may develop their skills and self-image in a way that encourages them to pursue STEM. It’s an arduous task to change how the world perceives women; virtual reality may help by changing how women perceive the world and their place in it.