(Press-News.org) Teenage boys are perhaps more known for playing computer games but girls are better at making them, a University of Sussex study has found.
Researchers in the University's Informatics department asked pupils at a secondary school to design and program their own computer game using a new visual programming language that shows pupils the computer programs they have written in plain English.
Dr Kate Howland and Dr Judith Good found that the girls in the classroom wrote more complex programs in their games than the boys and also learnt more about coding compared to the boys.
There are persistent concerns about the underrepresentation of women in computing - only 17% of the UK's computer science graduates in 2012 were female, despite a promising reduction of the gender gap in maths-related subjects at school level.
Some believe that girls are put off in their teenage years by the common portrayal of the 'nerdy boy' in TV and film.
This new study, published in the January 2015 issue of the journal Computers & Education, suggests that girls can be motivated to explore programming and create rich gameplay experiences by building on their skills in literacy and storytelling.
Dr Good says: "Given that girls' attainment in literacy is higher than boys across all stages of the primary and secondary school curriculum, it may be that explicitly tying programming to an activity that they tend to do well in leads to a commensurate gain in their programming skills.
"In other words, if girls' stories are typically more complex and well developed, then when creating stories in games, their stories will also require more sophisticated programs in order for their games to work."
The young people, aged 12-13, spent eight weeks developing their own 3D, role-playing games, using software made available with the popular medieval fantasy game Neverwinter Nights 2, which is based on the popular Dungeons & Dragons franchise.
Games like these are built on 'scripts', simple programs that describe what happens if or when a particular condition is met - e.g. if the player kills the dragon, a message is displayed on screen. However, many young people with no prior programming experience are daunted by the complexity of the coding languages used to build these scripts.
So, Dr Howland and Dr Good developed a new programming language called Flip that 'scaffolds' pupils as they script events within their game. It uses a simple interface in which users create scripts by connecting graphical blocks together. As well as generating the code to build the game, Flip also translates these scripts into plain English to help pupils understand the scripts they have created.
A range of different events were used by the pupils to trigger their scripts - for example, when a character is killed, or says something, or moves into a particular part of the screen.
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.
INFORMATION:
Notes for editors
University of Sussex press office contacts: James Hakner and Jacqui Bealing. Tel (+44) 1273 678888 or email press@sussex.ac.uk
Learning to communicate computationally with Flip: a bi-modal programming language for game creation is available online now and will be published in print in the January 2015 issue of the journal Computers & Education.
The research was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
"We have not seen an ice free period in the Arctic Ocean for 2,6 million years. However, we may see it in our lifetime." says marine geologist Jochen Knies. In an international collaborative project, Knies has studied the historic emergence of the ice in the Arctic Ocean. The results are published in Nature Communications.
The extent of sea ice cover in Arctic was much less than it is today between four and five million years ago. The maximum winter extent did not reaching its current location until around 2.6 million years ago. This new knowledge can now be used to ...
This news release is available in German. FRANKFURT The chances of patients with Philadelphia chromosome-positive leukaemia (Ph+) being cured has greatly increased in recent years. Nevertheless, a high percentage of patients have developed resistance to available medication. But now, haematologists from Frankfurt, working with a Russian pharmaceutical company, have developed a new active substance that effectively combats the most aggressive forms of Philadelphia chromosome-positive leukaemia, both in vitro and in vivo. They have reported this in the current edition ...
Tropical Depression 21W crossed the Philippines and moved into the South China Sea where warm waters helped strengthen the storm into Tropical Storm Sinlaku. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the storm and captured an image that showed it appeared elongated.
Despite the strengthening of Tropical Depression 21W into a tropical storm on Nov. 28, it appeared elongated from southwest to northeast on visible imagery taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard Aqua. The MODIS image also showed that the strongest thunderstorms ...
NASA's Terra satellite passed over Tropical Cyclone 02S after it formed in the Southern Indian Ocean on Nov. 28. An image from Terra showed that the new tropical storm is close to Mauritius and Reunion Islands.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of newborn Tropical Cyclone 02S northeast of the islands of Mauritius and Reunion. The MODIS image showed that thunderstorms were mostly west of the low-level center of circulation and bands of thunderstorms were wrapping into the center. ...
This news release is available in German. Humans don't like being alone, and their genes are no different. Together we are stronger, and the two versions of a gene - one from each parent - need each other. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin have analysed the genetic makeup of several hundred people and decoded the genetic information on the two sets of chromosomes separately. In this relatively small group alone they found millions of different gene forms. The results also show that genetic mutations do not occur randomly in the ...
Two physicists from the University of Warwick have taken to the kitchen to explain the complexity surrounding what they say is one of the last big mysteries in polymer physics.
As a way of demonstrating the complicated shapes that ring-shaped polymers can adopt, the researchers have created a brand new type of ring-shaped pasta, dubbed "anelloni" (anello being the Italian word for "ring"), which they've exclusively unveiled in this month's Physics World.
With just 2 eggs and 200 g of plain flour, Davide Michieletto and Matthew S Turner have created large loops of pasta ...
Peter Friedl, M.D., Ph.D., professor of genitourinary medical oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, has received one of Italy's top scientific awards for his work in imaging and cancer growth, metastasis and therapy response.
Friedl was named a recipient of the 13th annual City of Florence Prize in Molecular Sciences. Previous recipients include such scientific luminaries as AIDS research pioneer Robert C. Gallo. M.D., human genome sequencing expert J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., and Nobel laureates Robert Hubert, Ph.D. and Ada Yonath, Ph.D. Friedl received ...
Replenishing the supply of a molecule that normally activates cannabinoid receptors in the brain could relieve mood and anxiety disorders and enable some people to quit using marijuana, a Vanderbilt University study suggests.
Cannabinoid receptors are normally activated by compounds in the brain called endocannabinoids, the most abundant of which is 2-AG. They also are "turned on" by the active ingredient in marijuana.
Sachin Patel, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues developed a genetically modified mouse with impaired ability to produce 2-AG in the brain. The mice exhibited ...
This research is being carried out under the auspices of MAGDRIVE, a European research project coordinated by Professor José Luis Pérez Díaz, from the UC3M Instituto Pedro San Juan de Lastanosa, in which seven European entities participate. It consists of the development of a magnetic gear reducer, that is, a mechanism that transforms speed from an input axle to another in an output axle (as in a bicycle chain mechanism or the gearbox of an automobile). But in this case, unlike a conventional gear reducer, this transmission is produced without contact between ...
Astronomers have measured the passing of a super-Earth in front of a bright, nearby Sun-like star using a ground-based telescope for the first time. The transit of the exoplanet 55 Cancri e is the shallowest detected from the ground yet. Since detecting a transit is the first step in analyzing a planet's atmosphere, this success bodes well for characterizing the many small planets that upcoming space missions are expected to discover in the next few years.
The international research team used the 2.5-meter Nordic Optical Telescope on the island of La Palma, Spain, a moderate-sized ...
