While Anthony is a big supporter of coding organizations that reach girls at an older age, he thinks that starts too late. “By then,” he says, “many young girls have completely written off the field, whether they realize it or not.” To reach younger girls, Anthony focused instead on comics. He couldn’t find a single female comics hero who solved problems using engineering, software, or technology, so it was time to invent one of his own.
Despite his success as an entrepreneur and executive, Anthony ran into some obstacles. For one thing, he’s not a professional cartoonist. By his own admission, he can’t draw and he doesn’t know how to tell a story. For another, he had no funding. But with passionate recruiting, Anthony built a team to create his vision, which is how Ella the Engineer was born.
Ella the Engineer is a comic book hero who uses coding, hacking, and programming skills to solve problems that young girls can understand. Anthony’s hope is that by creating a techie supergirl who other girls want to emulate, more girls will get interested in pursuing technology careers. “Imagine you give a young girl an opportunity that had not been presented to her before,” he explains, “a path to a career that is both rewarding and successful. A place where it was rare for her to play. A place where the opportunities seem endless these days.”
Ella the Engineer is named after Anthony’s youngest daughter, who helped him pitch the idea at a TEDxYouth event. Both of his daughters, Ella and Nicolette, as well as Anthony’s son, Frankie, serve as advisors for the comic books to make sure that the stories are reaching their intended audience. Anthony describes his daughters as both his initial “case study” and his “personal focus group,” and he’s happy to report that they’ve enthusiastically endorsed his storylines.
The comics include a pitch-perfect villain—Glitch—who wreaks havoc by placing bugs and viruses into codes in everyday technology. Ella the Engineer uses her super-coding skills to hack into systems, reprogram malfunctions, and save the day. Ella is helped along the way by her trusty computer Mack, her loyal tablet Tabby, and her smart aleck iPhone Smarty. Together, they make an irresistible team. While the comics contain puzzles and cryptograms for girls to practice their skills, Anthony’s primary goal was to make the stories entertaining. “I wanted to not only show a hero who was a female lead and a computer science coder,” Anthony explains, “but I also wanted to show kids that technology is actually intertwined into everything that we do.”
Because Anthony wants to reach as many girls as possible, his comic books are available free online. Ella the Engineer also has her own Facebook and Twitter accounts where she posts news about girls and women in technology. Anthony wants girls to understand the social importance of software development and coding and spark creativity and confidence in building STEM skills. Most importantly, he wants girls to see STEM careers as inviting and fun.
The comic book series is part of a larger vision for expanding opportunities for girls in technology. Anthony envisions a tech world that’s filled with skilled, imaginative, and successful women engineers who build, lead, and grow technology companies—“because they had a hero in Ella.”
Since creating Ella, Anthony helped found SmartUp, a peer-to-peer learning platform that allows tech companies to share knowledge. He also became the General Manager of the Konrad Group, a digital innovation company. He’s now thinking about “Ella 2.0.” His dream is to get Ella the Engineer a movie gig so he can magnify her positive impact. He says he’ll know that he’s succeeded when he someday sees a giant, inflatable Ella floating past cheering crowds in a Thanksgiving Day parade.
In the meantime, Anthony has begun a new campaign for Ella the Engineer called STEM Figures, which connects the Ella comics with real-life female tech role models. Anthony is interviewing prominent women in the STEM field, including chief technology officers and tech entrepreneurs. He asks them what triggered their passion for math, science, or technology as young girls. Their stories are highlighted on his website, and they’ll be woven into plotlines that will let Ella connect with the same events that got these successful female leaders excited about STEM careers.
Anthony is collaborating on this project with Jewelbots, which are programmable friendship bracelets that teach girls how to code. The bracelets are open source devices that let girls practice basic programming skills. Girls can program the bracelets to light up when a friend is nearby, send secret messages, or flash a rainbow when a group of friends get together. Anthony plans to have Ella the Engineer use her own Jewelbot to call upon the particular female STEM leader whose story inspired the comic episode. When Ella hits a roadblock, she can press her Jewelbot and the female STEM icon will appear in cartoon form to guide her through the challenge.
Ella the Engineer has already had an impact on Anthony’s own daughters. His older daughter, Nicolette, decided to apply to her high school’s STEM track. While Anthony’s younger daughter, Ella, has proudly taken the books to school for show-and-tell, Anthony suspects that her spitfire nature will lead her to become a CEO. She’s definitely learned from Ella the Engineer the importance of understanding technology for being an effective company leader one day.
How Dads Can Get Started
Luckily, if you’re a dad who wants to fuel your daughters’ interest in STEM, you don’t have to create a new book series or comic superhero to have an impact. In addition to STEAMTeam 5 and Ella the Engineer, several other children’s books about girls in STEM are finding their way into bookstores. Check out Andrea Beaty’s trilogy: Rosie Revere, Engineer; Ada Twist, Scientist; and Iggy Peck, Architect. Or try Tanya Lee Stone’s Who Says Women Can’t Be Computer Programmers? and Kimberly Derting’s Cece Loves Science.
You can also follow the GeekDad technology blog and podcasts created by engineer dad Ken Denmead. Ken has a series of GeekDad project books for parents and kids, including The Geek Dad Book for Aspiring Mad Scientists. Another great resource is Mike Adamick’s hands-on guide, Dad’s Book of Awesome Science Experiments, which shows dads how to teach daughters chemistry with soap clouds, human biology with marshmallow pulse keepers, and physics with straw balloon rockets. If you need downtime while still being a stellar dad, have your daughters watch the PBS television show SciGirls, which highlights real tween girls using STEM skills to answer questions in their daily lives.
For dads who are looking for a perfect birthday present for daughters or their friends, there are terrific STEM-related games available online from The STEM Store. One of the best new toy lines was created by Debbie Sterling specifically for girls to practice STEM skills. Debbie studied mechanical engineering and product design at Stanford University, where she was shocked to see so few women in her program. Like Greg and Anthony, she decided there must be a way to get more girls excited about engineering.
Debbie spent time perusing toy stores, where she discovered that toys are highly sex-segregated. Even worse, she discovered that all the cool building and design toys are housed in the boys’ section. She funneled her irritation into a new obsession: “disrupting the pink aisle.” Debbie’s goal was to design toys that would counter gender stereotypes and introduce girls to the joys of engineering. The result was an award-winning set of construction games with the girl-power title, “GoldieBlox.”
Described by the Boston Globe as “an alternative to toys more concerned with looks than brains,” the GoldieBlox construction kits allow kids to build contraptions to solve relatable challenges. In one set, girls help Goldie build a belt drive spinning machine for Goldie’s dog, Nacho, to chase his tail and entertain the neighborhood pets. Another set lets girls design mansions with trapdoors, bridges, and balconies. There are even sets that teach girls how to safely launch female action figures careening down ziplines, skydiving, or speeding across aerial cable cars.
Debbie’s husband Beau Lewis was so inspired by the concept that he left his job at the video production company Seedwell to join GoldieBlox as a co-founder in 2013. Beau has an engineering degree from Stanford, and he worked as a Program Manager at Microsoft and Zillow. Although he wasn’t yet a dad, the mere thought of someday having a daughter was enough to motivate him to leave a lucrative tech career for the chance to make STEM-related toys for girls.
Debbie