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.
...while the boys are focused on learning how to be seen and how to claim territory and space. Are we really surprised when the tables are turned later?
I like how it's been less than 10 days and already the editors did not think to link to the Barbie: Computer Engineer story, where she only thinks up a design and then has to go to the boys to get the coding done.
Ironic the fictional land of Barbie, with a supposedly positive message for girls about careers in tech, is more misogynistic than the reality it seeks to change.
I've been 12. From experience, no, girls are not more developed at that age. That's the age where girls and boys take off in different directions. Girls imitate more, which makes them look more developed (and more well behaved), because doing your own stuff isn't quite as impressive when you can hardly do anything yet. They're just different, not further along the development axis.