Girls write more complex programs and learn more about coding than boys when it comes to making computer games, a study has found.



A group of 12 - 13-year old pupils spent eight weeks developing their own 3D role playing games as part of the University of Sussex study. Dr Kate Howland and Dr Judith Good developed Flip, a programming language which uses a simple interface to help the pupils string together scripts, basic programs which trigger a change within the game, such as a message popping up once a treasure chest is opened.



The girls used seven triggers within the games, almost twice as many as the boys of the group, and were much more successful at creating complex scripts with two or more parts and conditional clauses. Boys had a tendency to build their triggers around when a character said something, the most first and most simple trigger the class learned.



The games were created using software made available with fantasy game Neverwinter Nights 2, while Flip also translated the programs into English to help the students understand the scripts they'd created.

It seems Martin van Creveld may need to reconsider the title of his forthcoming work for Castalia House in light of how feminists are not even pretending feminism is about equality anymore:In other words, if adults dumb down a male activity and require girls to do it, the female interest in doing well scholastically and obediently pleasing their authority figures will cause them to outperform boys who just want to shoot people and blow things up.Naturally, this not-at-all cherry-planted-watered-and-carefully-harvested discovery completely supersedes forty years and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of economic activity created by young men who never had to be taught or encouraged to do anything. Many of us old school developers were actively discouraged from doing what we did; some of us don't even have college degrees of any kind.Did you even need to see the names to know that the "scientists" were women? This is precisely why the big push to get more women in STEM is certain to fail. Even when they manage to shepherd women through the educational process, most of them turn out to be more interested in fashion and thought-policing than they are in, you know, anything that resembles actual science.

Labels: games, science