Gender Differences in Story, Game and Visual Adventures in Hedy

Shirley de Wit, Felienne Hermans, Marcus Specht, Efthimia Aivaloglou

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSPLASH-E '24
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on SPLASH-E
EditorsFelienne Hermans, Rose Bohrer
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1-11
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9798400712166
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Event2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on SPLASH-E, SPLASH-E 2024, Co-located with: SPLASH 2024 - Pasadena, United States
Duration: 24 Oct 2024 → …

Conference

Conference2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on SPLASH-E, SPLASH-E 2024, Co-located with: SPLASH 2024
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPasadena
Period24/10/24 → …

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

Keywords

  • education
  • gender
  • Hedy
  • programming

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