Even though the field of Computer Science (CS) affects different aspects of society, several groups of society are under-represented, including women. Girls might have different learning opportunities in CS due to their project preferences. Girls who learn to program in the block-based language Scratch are likelier to work on stories and simple programs, 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 of 2,819 users born between 2009 and 2013. We found that children worked most on the game adventure and that girls saved more story programs than boys. We analysed programs implemented in the first five levels of Hedy. In some levels, boys made longer programs and used more (different) commands. When looking at individual adventures, we found differences between genders in story adventure level 5, game adventure levels 4 and 5, and visual adventure levels 1, 3 and 5. Our results imply that programming assignments can be created in which children of different genders work on similar programs in terms of size and (unique) number of commands used. However, gender differences occur in all three adventures in the highest level analysed.
Thu 24 OctDisplayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change
10:40 - 12:20 | |||
10:40 20mTalk | Gender Differences in Story, Game and Visual Adventures in Hedy SPLASH-E Shirley de Wit Delft University of Technology, Felienne Hermans Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Marcus Specht Delft University of Technology, Efthimia Aivaloglou Delft University of Technology | ||
11:00 20mTalk | Roles of Variables in the Hedy programming language SPLASH-E Julia Vanwijnsberghe-Bolt Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Felienne Hermans Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | ||
11:20 20mBreak | SPLASH-E Break SPLASH-E | ||
11:40 20mTalk | Using Computation Graphs to Explain Nondeterminism to Students SPLASH-E | ||
12:00 20mTalk | Visualizing Composed Turing Machines SPLASH-E |