A San Francisco Bay Area native, Carol grew up tinkering with her brothers’ model railroads and excelling in math. Her interest in CS began in high school when, in math class, she used a computer for the first time to write programs with BASIC. After graduating from UC Berkeley with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and then a master’s in Computer Science, she began working at Atari in 1978. Although she didn’t set out to do so, this was when Carol made history by becoming one of the first female game designers. “I didn’t really think about it too much,” Carol said about her role as Atari’s only female game designer at the time, “because I’d been used to not having a lot of women in my computer science classes. |
I mean, there were a few. In the surveying class I took, it was the second quarter that the professor had women in his class – I think he made some comment about just starting to get women in those fields.”
As a game designer at Atari, Carol hit the ground running. Her first project there was designing a Polo video game for release with Ralph Lauren’s Polo cologne. Although ultimately Atari decided not to release the game, the National Museum of Play credits Polo as the first documented video game designed and programmed by a woman. |
Science
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Technology
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Engineering
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Mathematics
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Empowerment
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