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The plan for Day 3 was to talk about the basic ideas of 3D space, coordinate systems, and how the 3D space is represented in a 2D image. I had two personal goals for this day: get the two girls to take some guesses, and say the words “Matrix Transformations” in a meaningful way.

Before the class started, I took a shot at singlehandedly solving one of the biggest issues in modern education: girls and geekiness. Now, the two Sophies in my class are really cool, smart girls; they clearly know what’s going on, they love to play the game, and they seem to be enjoying the class, but they don’t take any guesses during the discussion. There is so much built-in resistance to overcome to get them to participate, from the modern image of what girlhood is and what girls are supposed to be interested in to the ancient imbedded biological maxim that you can’t go wrong making a man feel smart. Regardless, they chose to take this class, and I’d like to try to get them to engage with the content a little. I had noticed that they were quite into the competitive element, cheering on their team and trash talking as required, so I mentioned to them before class that their team had falled behind a little bit yesterday because neither of them took any guesses, and they could help their team out by speaking up a little during the discussion. They nodded enthusiastically, and lo and behold, during the discussion, they actually took some guesses! It didn’t last, though, and I can’t yet try that gambit again; later in the week a Sophie would raise her hand and when called on point to Nemo.

It is clear that these kids by and large understand 3D, even if they’ve never really heard the terminology before. Nemo got a super papa bonus for correctly guessing that the third axis is called the z axis. The funniest thing is because ‘binary’ and ’software’ were answers on the first day of class that I got really excited about, they keep guessing those again just in case. “OK, how does the program know what lines to draw to make the perspective shape of the car?” “Uhhh, binary?” Which is fun, because it’s not exactly wrong!

However, we got through the stuff I wanted to talk about and then moved on to a 2 vs. 2 teams tournament. The kids are starting to get a little better at the game, but it’s still hard to get them to do anything other than blindly charge after the ball. But who could blame them?