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.

Comments

What kind of a "study" is this?

[popo]

"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?

Girls more developed at 12-13 years

[houghi]

News at 11.

Re:Which is why girls dominate game making...

[Notabadguy]

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.

Re:Which is why girls dominate game making...

[Karmashock]

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.