Slashdot Mirror
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.
"Complex stories"? "Two or more parts or conditional clauses"? Two???
"Trigger their scripts on when a character says something?"
I am a game developer. I have no idea what they are talking about.
More fundamentally: is "complexity" good?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
News at 11.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You're unnecessarily snarky. He is perfectly right to question the science; the conclusion IS far too strong for the evidence and methodology.
This article shouldn't even be on /.. It should only be here if a proper study is done.
In 180ish comments, I didn't see anyone chuckle at "the girls...learnt more about coding."
So to summarize:
-30 kiddies make up the sample set.
-No controls on the experiment.
-No prevention on collusion.
-12 year old girls in the sample set develop more complex games than 12 year old boys in the sample set.
-Arbitrary measure of complexity for measure.
-12 year old literacy in the summary.
Yep, this is a scientific study that I'll be referencing.
Girls excel at everything in school. Since the feminisation of the school system their is not a single subject that boys do not lag behind in. It is impossible to compete when the entire system is against you.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Girls have developed faster then boys at that age since always. It is a well known trait.
However, the boys catch up and then the advantage vanishes.
Games are not programmed or developed by 12 year olds. They're mostly developed by people between the ages of 25 and 45. An age bracket which is well beyond the critical age range you're talking about.
What is more, you can see in the colleges that even with women out numbering men in the colleges... the programming, mathematics, etc courses are mostly men. And amongst the hard programming and math courses... 99.999999 percent men.
Now am I saying women can't do this work? No. I am rather saying they don't want to do it. They sit down in the programming classes, notice it is not fun for them, and leave.
It is a choice.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If the study found the opposite:
1)- Would it make slashdot?
2)- Would there be some social reason given?
So seriously, why? Choosing 12 years old for the study- instead of 9, say, when boys and girls are basically the same thing- is a very odd choice, given the later development of boys. Choosing 15 would also give very different results. Generalizing the one point of human development when girls are ahead of boys is very odd, but why doesn't the article spend a million words saying that we need to help the boys get on the same level as the girls?
Almost every sex article- and CERTAINLY every gender one- is so political it's fucking insane.
There was an anecdote in a recentish book (sorry, blanking on the book) where a teacher noticed that the girls were doing better in language, and the boys in math. This bothered her- after all, boys shouldn't do better in math. Bothered her a lot, because, after all, she "knew" that boys and girls have similar math skills. Her solution was to segregate the boys and the girls math studies, based on the assumption that the girls were being intimidated by the boys, who held up their hands faster, etc. Eventually after doing this, the scores evened out or something, and she was happy that the world was exactly as she thought it was (after a lot of manipulation on her part). But, of course...
1)- Were the classes taught the same? If you care enough to teach math twice because the girls being behind enrages you, you are unlikely to be the most impartial teacher, right?
2)- If the girls being ahead in language and the boys being ahead in math enrages you because the boys are ahead, what happened when they split the language classes? They didn't do this part, of course- it was fine that the boys were behind in language. Not even the author relaying the ancedote seemed to consider this point.
3)- If there really is a better way to teach girls, then it stands to reason that there's a better way to teach boys. There's some gender zealots searching for the first, but shouldn't we be all about the second?
Anyway, back on topic, the program in question has nothing to do with anything, or real games. This study was likely designed from the start to show this, or spun that way for attention, and the metric for what "better" is seems entirely related to the "types of triggers" used. But I'm sure the rest of slashdot will poke holes in that obvious attention grab metric, and likely point out some more details with the NWN engine.
What would be interesting would be to take the scripted things and have them rated blindly by another group of 12-13 year olds.
Anyway, gender politics are so fucking all over the internet, and every side so zealous, that it's ludicrous to see slashdot dip their toe in it. I come here to read about tech, not read about some loopy gender warrior finding a way to spin their point of view (which is one of: sex A is worse at X, and that's society's fault, OR, sex A is worse at X, and that's because gender B is shining and perfect and obviously superior at X).