I woke up this morning and it looks like Kensie's got summer camp, a laptop and a reasonably nice used car.
9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp
51–57 of 57 posts
Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp
#52I don't buy it at all. The text was clearly written by the mother, a self described entrepreneur. I find it very hard to believe that this woman: http://www.linkedin.com/in/susanawilson Didn't come up with this as a scheme to make money, or that she couldn't afford to send her daughter to an $800 camp. It smacks of a stunt to grab money. Anyone with any familiarity with kickstarter knows damn well that it's a lottery…
Not only is she an entrepreneur, but was supposedly one of Fortune's "Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs." I'm guessing Kickstarter is definitely superfluous here, and it's a PR stunt. Pretty sad to see when I initially got really excited.
What better way to teach her daughter entrepreneurship than show her how to beg for money?
Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp
#53I'm all for girls learning how to program, but the negativity in this campaign is rubbing me the wrong way. There's male-bashing - her brothers are "mean" and "brats", and woman-shaming (the photos of the "gold diggers" - perhaps not a life choice I would make, but if both parties are happy, who am I to judge?) - if the point of this kickstarter is really to empower women (well, one woman), do we really need to point judgy fingers at other women and bring them down? There's a million amazing reasons for girls today to learn to code besides "if you don't, you'll have to marry some old fart for his money." Why couldn't they have highlighted some of those? ugh
Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp
#54This is absolutely fantastic . I don't know if she'll succeed in building the game or not but just having the motivation at such an early age is awesome. A question: "In case it's not already clear, I'm not a girlie girl." Assuming mom did not put this in, it's sad, but of course very common, to see the dichotomy "girlie girl"/"techie girl". And this has little to do with gender either, we also have "nerd"/"jock". Wh…
We totally exist in real life. My e-mail address as a kid was programmingprincess. ^_^ I no longer wear so much pink, but I still happily occupy both sides of the "girlie girl"/"techie girl" divide - and in fact, I've found that most women in tech I know don't fall under the socially awkward/fugly/geeky stereotype... if I sat a bunch of women from my office down in a room and you had to pick out the developers from say, the designers, QA, PMs, HR folk, etc - I'm not sure if you could. I think this dichotomy is enforced more by the media than it is by real life.
Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp
#55She's not exactly a struggling mother who needs the money to make her child's dream come true. She could probably stretch to a laptop or even a 100 of them. Is this meant to be educational? For whom? There are quite a few projects by people who do actually need the money to have a chance for their dreams to come true.
Well, some people just like money. I don't think you'll be able to find another justification sadly. Not sure how come she raised 7k.
$20k.
And still no meaningful update: Re, a video proving these are real people and not some guy in his basement using images he found on google. Also no discussion whatsoever as to what they intend to do with the additional funding (with physical goods, the funding would generally scale up with the cost while in other projects, the greater funding generally allows for a scaled-up project. I don't expect that's reasonable for a 9 year old who has never programmed or designed a thing, so I'm really interested to find what will be done with the extra $19k and how it will adhere to Kickstarter's policies).
Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp
#56No pressure. No pressure at all. There is now just the whole Internet watching this little girl and layering creative interpretations. I for one am for the interpretation that this is not a money scam, or a publicity stunt, but a parent who wanted to do a fun activity with their kid and it happens to be on kickstarter. @jgerman said > This project has a nominal [...] I'll be surprised if Kickstarter doesn't pull it.…
If they're so technologically advanced in 2013, why do they need mom to help them get funding to go attend a camp where they are taught how to do something that they can learn freely online? Kids with none of these resources learned on their own against all sorts of adversity and lack of resources in the 80s and 90s. If you really have a passion to do something -- do it. You don't need a camp or an instructor or a mentor to guide you through it. You just do it, because it becomes a constant obsession.
I don't think this kickstarter is a scam (though it is certainly presented like one -- scammy projects usually don't have video of the people behind it and keep promising things that are never delivered, which goes for this one too since the mom keeps promising a video to show that they're real people and not some guy in his basement using google images of some lady and little kid for his scam).
I just think that it's a little unnecessary and is becoming really ridiculous and I'm tired of seeing stuff from parents all over the place posting things like "my kid wants to be a game developer, how do I get them started?". If your kid REALLY wants to do something like that, they aren't going to come to you and ask you to help them. They're going to get online and start googling, reading forums, reading books, downloading free programs and learning to code or design games on their own. If kids could do this in the 80s and 90s, they can do it today.
As for a publicity stunt? I don't know. It sure smells like a stunt for her mom's "give women money to do whatever" website. She'll go on from this project to claim herself an expert in crowd-funding and women's issues. She'll write a book. Become a consultant. Popularize her website. Give a few interviews.
Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp
#57Interesting that its over $20K today (Mar 23) which was the target of the original Kickstarter the Mom did. That provides an interesting insight into the motivations behind backers.