Gender Differences in Story, Game and Visual Adventures in Hedy
Shirley de Wit (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Felienne Hermans (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Marcus Specht (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Efthimia Aivaloglou (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
Even though the field of Computer Science (CS) affects different aspects of society, several groups of society are underrepresented, including women and nonbinary people. Children might have different learning opportunities in CS due to their project preferences. Girls are likelier to work on stories and simple programs in Scratch, whereas boys tend to create games and more complex programs. We explore whether preferences and program implementation differ between genders within a story, game and visual adventure in Hedy, a gradual textual programming language. We analysed 14,233 programs within five Hedy levels created by 2,819 users who turned 10 to 14 in 2023. We found that boys, girls and nonbinary children worked most on the game adventure. Within the individual adventures, gender differences occur in all three adventures in the most elaborate Hedy level analysed. However, for some levels, no gender differences were found. Thus, programming assignments can be created in which children of different genders work on similar programs in terms of size and number of (unique) commands used.
help_outline