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In UK Study, Girls Best Boys At Making Computer Games
New submitter Esteanil writes Researchers in the University of Sussex's Informatics department asked pupils at a secondary school to design and program their own computer game using a new visual programming language. The young people, aged 12-13, spent eight weeks developing their own 3D role-playing games.
The girls in the classroom wrote more complex programs in their games than the boys and also learnt more about coding.
The girls used seven different triggers – almost twice as many as the boys – and were much more successful at creating complex scripts with two or more parts and conditional clauses.
Boys nearly always chose to trigger their scripts on when a character says something, which is the first and easiest trigger to learn.
Varies by engine, but a lot of game logic these days is specified via visual programming languages, especially at big "AAA" game companies. The engine itself and the graphics/rendering parts, along with some computationally sensitive AI bits, will be written in C++, but a lot of the actual gameplay-relevant logic and events are scripted using something like Kismet (UDK3) or Blueprints (UDK4). Partly this is because in big companies, game logic has moved more and more towards becoming the responsibility of the level and character designers, while the "programmers" have become more specialized engine/graphics coders who don't actually program anything to do with gameplay.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Fortunately my university provides me with access to the original study, so for those who are interested:
The study was performed on three elementary school classes with a total of 55 students (29 girls, 26 boys). Despite the small sample size, they did perform a statistical analysis and found the results to be significant (p < 0.001), the results being that girls on average scored higher on a computational thinking test before and after the course. The differences in improvement between genders was not significant and it is worth noting that despite having lower average scores before and after the course, the range of scores for boys in post-testing extended higher and lower than those of girls. I wish I could link the boxplot for the data but I'm not sure that's legal.
It is also important to note that the study was not performed in order to measure the difference between boys and girls in programming, but to measure the benefits of using their special programming software over an eight-week course. The software itself is indeed very visual, and the 'programming' is done by dragging around boxes with partial statements and filling in the blanks with object boxes. The software then constructs a text interpretation of the code in a lower box, which is what the computational thinking problems related to.