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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.
... Oh wait.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"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?
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Interesting result.
It will be interesting to see if any of the girls in the class go on to be the next Caitlin Colgrove, Adele Goldberg or Barbara Liskov.
However, I'd expect more of a bell curve in both genders with the average for girls being better than the average for boys. If the girls uniformly did better and the boys uniformly did worse, that sounds strange.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
...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?
Strict requirements? That's a silly thing to throw into some feel-good study.
It's not like anyone who grows up to work with computers will ever get more than "this is broke, fix it" or "just make it happen" as their direction or "requirements".
How about key grips & focus pullers?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I can't get to the study but it seems like the sample size was one secondary school class. That's routhly 30 children. How is this considered a scientific study?
News at 11.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
Article by By Rhiannon Williams (fem).
Research by Dr Kate Howland (fem) and Dr Judith Good (fem)!
Can you smell the biasness and bullcrap from where you are? I rest my case. We will need a new study.
My experience is that girls are more commonly better programmers than boys (I've worked with programming for 30+ years). The solutions are more thorough and well-thought in general, and they tend to be better at teamwork, and better at seeking help when they are stuck (instead of being stuck for four weeks until someone pokes them about it).
I've always been sad there are so few girls in programming, since they would do an excellent job.
And, for that matter, engineering in general.
That said, not sure what this study was about and if it gives any conclusion on the matter other than what we already knew - girls and boys have similar brains that can solve complex, abstract problems, and gender difference is overlapped by individual difference...?
Anyway, girls, if you want to become a programmer, please become a programmer.
That girls end up better at game design won't surprise me. They typically have a better understanding of human psychology and I believe that as tools become better, it will become more important than technical skills. 1
But this study say nothing about what will happen when these kids reach adulthood, or even high school. Girls start puberty about 1 year earlier than boys, with all the associated physical and mental changes. At 12-13, the difference in maturity between boys and girls is huge. Boys start to catch up only at about 16 or so.
Unless we're talking about NTFS.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
From experience, you have much better likelihood of getting girls while being a bad boy, than a nice guy. My sexual life skyrocketed when I stopped being one.
I can't get to the paper, but it doesn't actually say anywhere that the girls were uniformly better. All subjects improved their understanding of computation, but the girls as a group did significantly better.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Saying what is stated in the article is actually the same as saying that girls are better at literacy because they tends to be more interested by complex novel, rather than comics. By comparison, reading Emile Zola is so much of a boring pain. I hated it. However, reading Tolkien or even Jack London is so enjoyable...
NTFS has a few other nice properties. The OS team kept changing their minds about requirements right up until the first version shipped, so the FS team ended up just creating an efficient store for key-value pairs with large and small values. Everything else is layered on top, by defining special key namespaces. This is why Microsoft has been able to constantly add features to NTFS over its lifespan - very little is set in stone.
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Btw, Randi Harper (aka "freebsdgirl") is writting game too. The principle is actually super duper easy, try to have a rational debate with her, and get flagged as an harasser. The more social media profile you get banned from, the more points you win. Currently, my best score is 2, but working on getting a 3rd point.
You'll enjoy Depression Quest !
So don't try and have a rational debate with her then. She's clearly not interested and if you make it into a game then you're just being a childish troll.
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.
School forces children to do an activity. Boys cheapskate the task, girls dive into it. What's new here? That's how it was when I went to school.
When it's "learnt" and not "learned".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
- Calling Flip a "programming language" is quite a stretch. It is not. That's the whole point in it, in fact.
- The metric to determine how good a game is is not how "complex" it is, but how much fun it is.
Structures that require a lot of rebalancing on operations are not always a good idea for disks, as they can require a lot of block writes to occur in the correct sequence to preserve filesystem integrity.
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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.
Maybe this is the future of programming; drag blocks and symbols around the screen so they snap together into a working program. It doesn't surprise me though, visual WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver aren't really programming anyway.
Yea, if someone asked me to code a program, I'd just go with "Hello World". It's simple and get's the job done.
Why did the editors let this crap through?
YMBNH
No, it was a supposition because he didn't know them.
Do ... not ... project.
Games are not programmed or developed by 12 year olds.
Commercial console games aren't. But a 25 year old who has been making computer games since 12 is going to have an advantage over someone who didn't write a line of code until university.
Gamergate is a crock of shit.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Everywhere. Kill them all. But wait, what will women complain about then?
At the beginning, I thought she was a reasonable person...
Nothing more than the same rehashed formulas over and over. Nothing much has changed, the same old tired FPS. Or adventure quests which are FPS with elves. No creativity or imagination. Sort of like fast food or the mega beer brewers or the soda manufacturers. The same old formula.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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).
We men are the ones discriminated as we don't have maternity leave and that is why we are more valuble for the industry
Preferential treatment based on being male? And you claim that men are being discriminated against?
BTW, here parental leave is split between the parents. They're free to split the time off as they see ft.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The game doesn't only totally suck - it's misleading to the point of possibly being a health hazard.
this is an amalgamation of the experiences of the developers and several people close to them.
In depression quest you can go to talk to a therapist. The therapist will eventually bring up the possibility of medication, and if you say ok, writes you a prescription.
However, that's not the way it works. Psychiatrists can write prescriptions - neither psychologists nor therapists can.
In the game, after getting on antidepressants, you get into the habit of socially drinking with people as you become less depressed.
Mixing antidepressants with booze is a dumb idea.
Alcohol use while taking antidepressants is discouraged by all manufacturers of the drugs. In addition, alcohol is known to cause or worsen depression and should generally be avoided while on antidepressants. The recurrent use of even small amounts of alcohol (e.g. one drink per day) has been shown to reduce the potential for full benefits of antidepressants. If you choose to drink alcohol while taking antidepressants, you should use extreme caution.
Even SSRIs, which have the least interaction with alcohol, come with a warning label that says "Do not drink alcoholic beverages."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
"Role playing" is more social. Boys tend to be more physical. Make it more physics- and action-based and you may see a flip, especially if you add explosions.
Table-ized A.I.
School has become emasculation factories, because everything about being a boy is considered bad in the progressive morality.
Maybe she is, maybe she isn't. But clearly she doesn't want to have this debate separately with hundreds of different people.
Geez! Go to a public forum and discuss it there. You'll find people who are willing to talk about it, I'm sure.
Most of the posters either denigrated the study or made the assertion that we catch up later in life.
This defensive response validates the study and shows the insecurity of the male mindset.
Female minds integrate facts faster and better than the male mind and females multitask better than males.
I believe that the female mind is more adapted to the psychology of game-making than the male mind. The programming technology for game development allows this difference to manifest.
Programming is the means to an end. Remove the technological hurdle and the innate abilities show themselves.
Males are better at learning programming; it's a cognitive task that we are good at. Females want to "get to it" without having to learn the language.
Girl-invented games would be more relational than sequential, have more intricate plots and provide more variety of response to a (perceived) threat.
So there.
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Women's brain is horizontally wired and good at multitasking.
Women's brains are designed for social skills and memory while men's are for perception and coordination.
http://m.timesofindia.com/home...
Casteism
Boys are dumb and girls are smart, we get it lol
Girls were dominant in general when I was in grade school but I dominated them in all classes. Teachers made pets out of the smart girls and tended to ignore me but I did not care. I had as many stars as the top girls did in the lower grades and got as many E's and then A's on tests as the smartest girls as well.
In the third grade, we had a math face-off competition. All the smart girls ended up on one team and one by one, my team kept falling into the smart girls team until I was the only one left in my team. It was me against the smartest girl. I beat her. The bell rang to end the class but I knew that I had won the entire contest. Once I had the smartest girl on my team, the other smart girls would "fail" to her on purpose and to me because I was smarter. At that point, it was over.
In summary, girls may dominate subjects in general during grade school but it is not always true.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen