Geek of the Week - Carol Shaw

Ravenclaws love to blaze trails through new frontiers and defy expectations – and this week’s Geek of the Week is no exception! Carol Shaw is credited with being the first female video game designer for her work on 3D Tic-Tac-Toe on the Atari 2600 system in 1978.

Shaw was born in Palo Alto, California in 1955. As a child, she enjoyed computers and railroad sets, and gained an appreciation of technology from her father, who was a mechanical engineer at Stanford. She used a computer for the first time in high school, and decided to focus her further studies in the field of computers. She graduated from Berkeley with a BS in Electrical Engeering and Computer Science, and then completed an MS in Computer Science, also at Berkeley.

After Berkeley, Shaw began work at Atari, where she wrote several games for the Atari 2600. In 1980, Shaw moved to Tandem Computers, and then Activision in 1982. At Activision, she programmed and designed Happy Trails and the popular game River Raid.  

As a trail-blazing game designer, Carol Shaw is a very fitting Geek of the Week!

For more information:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Shaw_(video_game_designer)

http://www.stuffmomnevertoldyou.com/blogs/stem-women-hall-of-fame-the-first-female-video-game-designer.htm