ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1995, I went from graduate school to elementary school, hoping to learn how children learn about computers. My initial goal was to observe children’s social interactions in a computer integrated curriculum: to see if girls and boys demonstrated notable differences in their relationships to computer use and software preference in an environment in which all children were encouraged and required to produce school work with programs and keyboards in addition to paper and pencil tools. For reasons owing more to my own circadian rhythms rather than any scholarly research design, I often arrived towards the close of morning language arts just in time for recess at 10:30. Over a succession of recesses I noticed a pattern worthy of further investigation. At recess, when all the children are allowed to choose from a number of free-time ‘play’ activities, girls play hopscotch and boys play Incredible Machine.1 The self-imposed gendered segregation about this game playing activity was too incredible to ignore.
