Girls better than boys at making story-based computer games

I learned about this work at VL/HCC a couple months ago. It’s an interesting connection to the earlier post on women being better than men as programmers (see link here).

Teenage boys are perhaps more known for playing computer games but girls are better at making them, a University of Sussex study has found. Researchers in the University’s Informatics department asked pupils at a secondary school to design and program their own computer game using a new visual programming language that shows pupils the computer programs they have written in plain English. Dr Kate Howland and Dr Judith Good found that the girls in the classroom wrote more complex programs in their games than the boys and also learnt more about coding compared to the boys.

Source: Girls better than boys at making story-based computer games, Sussex study finds : Press release archive : News and events : University of Sussex