On this page, you will find information about our SPLASH-E 2024 paper 'Gender Differences in Story, Game and Visual Adventures in Hedy'. You can find the full research paper in the ACM Digital Library (open access).
Even though the field of Computer Science (CS) affects different aspects of society, several groups of society are under-represented, 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.
This paper is written by Shirley de Wit, Marcus Specht, Felienne Hermans and Efthimia Aivaloglou
If you have any questions or if you want to talk about our study, feel free to contact me.
The Python scripts we used to analysed the data can be downloaded here.
During the presentation, we also mention the project 'Towards Open Inclusive STEM Education' that we are currently working on. With this project, we want to support and educate teachers on the meaning of inclusive education, provide them with the tools to implement this knowledge, and collect open education resources and examples that they can reuse in their own education. We want to make the barrier to creating and using inclusive education as low as possible and show that, even with small adjustments, you can work towards more inclusive education. If you are or know someone who is putting diversity, equity and inclusion on the agenda and/or into practice, then please feel free to connect and share your experiences. This project is funded by the Open Education Stimulation Fund.