Herstory

Inspiration

Despite significant efforts and improvement towards gender equality, STEM related fields remain male dominated, with women frequently underrepresented and overlooked. Such gender disparity not only discourages women from pursuing these fields, but also young girls' aspirations and attitudes towards STEM careers. The SheHacks event itself was a source of inspiration for us; as SheHacks aims to support and motivate post-secondary female students get involved in the tech space, and we also wanted to find a way to achieve the same effect within a younger audience. Our team hopes to address the gender imbalance and inspire future generations of women by educating them about the pioneering contributions women have made to the field through a fun and interactive game that takes the player along their own journey towards a treasure (enlightenment).

What it does

Our current version of the game starts out with the player being introducted to their mission and beinng provided a map. They will then meet 3 characters, and will choose 1 to interact with. Each pioneering women is associated with a specific problem the player has to solve, and as the player progresses through the challenge, they will recieve task related hints from the pioneering woman, as well as bits of information about their story. Once the player successfully completes the task, they will get the opportunity to read an in-depth summary on their helping friend as well as their contributions to the STEM field. Once the player completes all three tasks, they will win the game and reach the treasure. At the end of the game, the player should have learned about 3 amazing women in STEM's stories and ideally feel encouraged and motivated to pursue their own goals.

How we built it

HerStory was developed using Python, and for game specific functionalities we utilized pygame. Piskel and avatarsinpixels were used to create our graphical designs.

Challenges we ran into

time constraints

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With SheHacks being half of our groups first hackathon, we feel proud of the fact we were able to work harmoniously to plan, develop and implement an idea we all passionate and proud of. As well, it was all of our first experiences with game development, so we feel accomplished in what we were able to achieve with limited knowledge. As strangers coming into this experience,

What's next for Herstory

Adding additional tasks to reach the goal
Learning the background story of additional characters
Develop a point system to track the player's choices and create more complex win/lose scenarios