In UK Study, Girls Best Boys At Making Computer Games 312
New submitter Esteanil writes Researchers in the University of Sussex's Informatics department asked pupils at a secondary school to design and program their own computer game using a new visual programming language. The young people, aged 12-13, spent eight weeks developing their own 3D role-playing games.
The girls in the classroom wrote more complex programs in their games than the boys and also learnt more about coding.
The girls used seven different triggers – almost twice as many as the boys – and were much more successful at creating complex scripts with two or more parts and conditional clauses.
Boys nearly always chose to trigger their scripts on when a character says something, which is the first and easiest trigger to learn.
Which is why girls dominate game making... (Score:4, Funny)
... Oh wait.
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I'm kind of wondering if this story might not necessarily even be applicable to game making. From TFA:
“Given that girls’ attainment in literacy is higher than boys across all stages of the primary and secondary school curriculum, it may be that explicitly tying programming to an activity that they tend to do well in leads to a commensurate gain in their programming skills," said Dr Good.
“In other words, if girls’ stories are typically more complex and well developed, then when creating stories in games, their stories will also require more sophisticated programs in order for their games to work.”
I actually remember that from grade school, the girls were usually more literate and more patient for reading/story time than the boys were. The boys were more looking forward to recess/mischief/etc at those times. Especially the mischief part for me.
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This gap is only present temporarily. Boys catch up quickly in this area.
Do we really want to do Male authors VS Female authors match up? Men are at least as good as women at writing. Note... MEN and WOMEN. Girls are probably better then boys. But it doesn't last.
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Do we really want to do Male authors VS Female authors match up?
No [nhne.com].
Re:Which is why girls dominate game making... (Score:5, Insightful)
Girls have developed faster then boys at that age since always. It is a well known trait.
However, the boys catch up and then the advantage vanishes.
Games are not programmed or developed by 12 year olds. They're mostly developed by people between the ages of 25 and 45. An age bracket which is well beyond the critical age range you're talking about.
What is more, you can see in the colleges that even with women out numbering men in the colleges... the programming, mathematics, etc courses are mostly men. And amongst the hard programming and math courses... 99.999999 percent men.
Now am I saying women can't do this work? No. I am rather saying they don't want to do it. They sit down in the programming classes, notice it is not fun for them, and leave.
It is a choice.
12 to 25 vs. 18 to 25 (Score:2)
Games are not programmed or developed by 12 year olds.
Commercial console games aren't. But a 25 year old who has been making computer games since 12 is going to have an advantage over someone who didn't write a line of code until university.
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And when girls start programming at 12 in any numbers you'll have a point.
As of now... nope.
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Girls have developed faster then boys at that age since always. It is a well known trait.
It's a popular myth.
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Whether or a myth or not, it doesn't matter because the advantage is very temporary.
The boys catch up rapidly.
How can people think men are inferior when we have this enormous history of men doing brilliant things? Seriously... people that take that posture need to read a book or go to a museum.
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Didn't you know? We men have been using our superior size, strength, and proficiency at unarmed combat (along with a whole lot of rape) to keep women down for millenia. If it weren't for that, women would be running everything and would be recognized as the great superiors in all categories.
Re:Which is why girls dominate game making... (Score:5, Insightful)
In 180ish comments, I didn't see anyone chuckle at "the girls...learnt more about coding."
So to summarize:
-30 kiddies make up the sample set.
-No controls on the experiment.
-No prevention on collusion.
-12 year old girls in the sample set develop more complex games than 12 year old boys in the sample set.
-Arbitrary measure of complexity for measure.
-12 year old literacy in the summary.
Yep, this is a scientific study that I'll be referencing.
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So to summarize:
-30 kiddies make up the sample set.
-No controls on the experiment.
-No prevention on collusion.
-12 year old girls in the sample set develop more complex games than 12 year old boys in the sample set.
-Arbitrary measure of complexity for measure.
-12 year old literacy in the summary.
You forgot:
- Had the "study" somehow concluded that boys were better it would have never seen the light of day, rendering all such studies meaningless due to selection bias.
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Which is why girls dominate game making... Oh wait.
Well, gaming is now 50:50, I'm sure game development will follow.
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Also, when you look at more interesting and original, less copy-pasty games, female developers and designers seem to be more common than in the industry overall.
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citation? The only female writers in games I can name off the top of my head... were the writers of the games: King's Quest and the Longest Journey.
King's quest first off was not well written. It was fun but the stories were predictable and very derivative.
The Longest Journey was good but you have to remember it was competing in the Adventure Game category which are very much about their stories.
Now... now is the longest journey the BEST adventure game ever? It is all a matter of opinion, but I'd point at t
Re:Which is why girls dominate game making... (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong. Women and men gravitate to certain career paths. Women choose NOT to sit for hours in front of computers learning to code.
Anecdote: When I introduced RPG Maker in an after-school program at the urging of one boy, more girls than boys asked if they could also participate. The girls also stuck with it longer than every boy, save the original. (The girls averaged about three weeks vs the boys four days, not counting the first boy, who spent 4 months on his creation.)
Children, regardless of gender, enjoy creative activities. Moving on...
The only female writers in games I can name off the top of my head
You'd be amazed at how many games were written and designed by women, even in the old days. Sticking with just well-known titles: River Raid (Carol Shaw), Centipede (Dona Bailey, later driven from the industry by male co-workers), Archon (Anne Westfall), [bunch of Sierra games] (Jane Jensen), Laser Surgeon [okay, not as well known, but the name you'll recognize] (Brenda Laurel), Plundered Hearts, Zork Zero (Amy Briggs), I could go on all day, it seems.
That doesn't even begin to touch on the countless influential women in game design, who bring talents aside from programming to the table like Lucy Bradshaw, Robin Hunicke [gamasutra.com] (who you dismissed without naming earlier), Brenda Brathwaite, Alyssa Finley, Linda Currie ... like the earlier list, this just doesn't end.
The point of all this? That you're not aware of many famous women in games does not mean that there aren't many famous women in games.
Do you know what keeps women out of game development? Attitudes like yours, as illustrated by the aforementioned Dona Bailey.
And before you give me some presto intellectual argument about how they're just conditioned to not want to do these things... Wrong. Women and men gravitate to certain career paths. Women choose NOT to sit for hours in front of computers learning to code.
Back in the early 80's something like 40% of CS graduates were women. Why do you think they seem to have collectively chosen to avoid it and related fields? It clearly wasn't a problem earlier, after all.
I think that you know why. You just don't like the answer.
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Really? That's not what she said. She specifically said she was NOT intimidated out of the industry.
BTW, why didn't you mention one of the most well-known women in gaming: Roberta Williams?
You're looking at it backwards. In the l
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Well that was all I had... I thought the LJ was written by a women but I was wrong.
So... does anyone have a game written by a woman that was actually well written?
I'm not saying they can't write a good script for a game. I'm just saying I can't think of one.
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Wrong, this has been established in many studies on small children as young as toddlers... there are distinct tendencies between the sexes.
You cannot tell me a toddler has be socialized to desire given things based on sex. And yet in those studies, such children were shown to prefer given toys largely on sexual grounds.
I grant that the nurture component is very strong. However, what you are saying is that nature doesn't exist at all. Which is unsupportable.
We are a sexually dimorphic species. This has been
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You cannot tell me a toddler has be socialized to desire given things based on sex. And yet in those studies, such children were shown to prefer given toys largely on sexual grounds.
Of course toddlers are socialized to desire given things based on sex. It starts within days of birth. Girls are in the pink clothes, boys are in the blue clothes. Girls are more commonly told "you are so pretty" and boys are more commonly told "you are so smart." Girls get a princess castle, boys get a truck. The very fact that Babies R Us even has a boys and girls section for infants and toddlers shows the socialization starts that young.
I'm not saying socialization is the only reason boys and girls are d
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If you're saying a male toddler prefers to chew on toy trucks while a female toddler prefers to chew on dollies because of socialization... then you've created an orthodoxy that cannot be falsified.
This is officially your belief system. And that's fine. I won't challenge your belief system so long as you acknowledge it as such. By all means, have little meetings with your buddies at your local temple or whatever and take off a few random days of the year to observe... whatever. But your claims on science if
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And if you're saying that male toddlers prefer trucks over dolls without socialization, you're either saying that male toddlers prefer hard toys over squishy ones - which is easily tested for with truck plushies - or that human genome includes genes that encode trucks, which is... pretty weird.
So maybe you shoul
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according to wikipedia:
""
Developer(s) Valve Corporation
Publisher(s)
Valve Corporation
Microsoft Game Studios (XBLA)4
Distributor(s)
Electronic Arts (retail)
Steam (online)
Writer(s)
Erik Wolpaw
Chet Faliszek
Composer(s)
Kelly Bailey
Mike Morasky
""
same with portal 2... only there are some extra dudes on that one.
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It isn't actually unless you want to count facebook games which is the only way you're going to get numbers like that.
And as to girls being developers... sure... just like they're 50 percent of programmers, right?... Oh wait.
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Why wouldn't you count them? I don't think this UK study had 13 year olds making AAA blockbuster games.
Games are boring (Score:2)
Nothing more than the same rehashed formulas over and over. Nothing much has changed, the same old tired FPS. Or adventure quests which are FPS with elves. No creativity or imagination. Sort of like fast food or the mega beer brewers or the soda manufacturers. The same old formula.
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Exactly. Tell me they're better when they actually make the games.
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Women have been making video games since the beginning! As I noted earlier, River Raid (of the the top games on the 2600) was written by Carol Shaw, a women. I also mentioned Dona Bailey, who co-developed the hit arcade classic Centipede.
But let's let your limited knowledge and experience dictate reality. That way, we don't have to let those icky girls in to our clubhouse.
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pretty much exactly. They've so over saturated the market with these stupid articles that they've come out of solution. It is just piling up on the bottom of the beaker now.
What kind of a "study" is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Complex stories"? "Two or more parts or conditional clauses"? Two???
"Trigger their scripts on when a character says something?"
I am a game developer. I have no idea what they are talking about.
More fundamentally: is "complexity" good?
Re: What kind of a "study" is this? (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't understand your post at all and I'm a physics student creating software for a bank and am quite fluent when it comes to problems of simulation and such, even though I've never created more complex games.
Have you tried reading the study? No one said complexity is better, just that girls are able to create more complex games at that age.
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> "Just that girls are able to create more complex games"
Actually, that's nice that you added your own personal take-away, but that's not what the study showed. You are turning preference into capacity.
It's also not how the study is described here on Slashdot:
"I'm a UK Study, Girls Best Boys at Making Computer Games"
That is very different from "just" saying anything about complexity.
And why is performance at a particular age relevant anyway? Is this a study of childhood developmental capacity? Because
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I actually was able to read the study through my university. The story claims that girls are better at making games because they use more triggers than boys--except the other 95% of the time when they use the same triggers, at close to the same frequency as the boys. Of the 108 scripts produced by girls, five of them used triggers that boys did not use, with one extra trigger used three times and the other two used once each. The majority of girls also used the 'when someone says a line' trigger, not just b
Re:What kind of a "study" is this? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm guessing they had things like...
Trigger
Character says "Xxxxx".
Character attacks.
Character is damaged.
Character places objects on table.
Character gives objects to NPC.
Character is hungry.
Character is wielding X when close to a spot.
For some reason, the boys only used the 1st trigger and the result was a stereotypical "prompt/respond" roleplaying game.
Using the other triggers would provide a less stereotypical experience.
Not sure why all the girls did well and all the boys did badly. That seems off.
Perhaps there was a particular girl who "got it" and showed the other girls how to use the other triggers or shared code and made it easier for them to figure it out. Perhaps the teacher prompted the girls in some way.
In any case, the girls did better in this case-- perhaps some will turn out to be major names and the experience has to bolster their confidence.
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> Not sure why all the girls did well and all the boys did badly. That seems off.
If the girls study more, on average, then when the matter of study is a videogame, they will emerge with a better one.
Now, for stuff who requires actual genius like 2d arcade style gameplay (it requires genius because most kind of dynamics have already been explored and the play experience has no guidelines, while in 3d one can use realism as a primary guideline) then both genders would have probably failed and we would have
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Yeah I was wondering if the kids were allowed to share and over what timespan the project ran. If there was downtime between sessions, the girls are more likely to collaborate and text and share good stuff. The boys are more likely to guard a good secret, because they want to 'win'.
A group of girls is always going to be less competitive with each other than a group of boys, unless, of course, they are competing for boys...
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You know, something else just occurred to me. This was an already existing computer class, that I bet is an elective course.
In that case, girls that choose to enter a more advanced computer class are more likely to be hotshots than the more common boys. Skewed sample?
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This was a UK school so chances are the class was mandatory. Children don't get to choose what they study until the last two years of school in most cases.
More over, girls do better than boys in general at school. These results are not that surprising.
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As GP stated, "better" is a relative term and without context I can't provide an opinion on who's game I would like better. Complexity on it's own is not a measure. I have a few points of disagreement with your statements.
For some reason, the boys only used the 1st trigger and the result was a stereotypical "prompt/respond" roleplaying game.
Stereotypical RPG isn't bad on it's own. What experience did the kids have with RPGs and were they told to design like their favorite?
Using the other triggers would provide a less stereotypical experience.
It could also make for a boring game. Context is critical, because puzzles are not the same as nagging dialogue (and we have all seen both).
Not sure why all the girls did well and all the boys did badly. That seems off.
The whole ar
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In any case, the girls did better in this case
In what sense? Whether X is better than Y is subjective. Complexity is subjective. Those requirements are arbitrary.
How can people take such subjective studies seriously (at least assuming it's anything like the Slashdot title and summary say).
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Ah. So how's Ubisoft treating you?
Re: What kind of a "study" is this? (Score:5, Informative)
Varies by engine, but a lot of game logic these days is specified via visual programming languages, especially at big "AAA" game companies. The engine itself and the graphics/rendering parts, along with some computationally sensitive AI bits, will be written in C++, but a lot of the actual gameplay-relevant logic and events are scripted using something like Kismet (UDK3) or Blueprints [unrealengine.com] (UDK4). Partly this is because in big companies, game logic has moved more and more towards becoming the responsibility of the level and character designers, while the "programmers" have become more specialized engine/graphics coders who don't actually program anything to do with gameplay.
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a lot of game logic these days is specified via visual programming languages... The engine itself and the graphics/rendering parts, along with some computationally sensitive AI bits, will be written in C++, but a lot of the actual gameplay-relevant logic and events are scripted.... Partly this is because in big companies, game logic has moved more and more towards becoming the responsibility of the level and character designers.
To me, this approach looks a lot like Microsoft's Project Spark. Project Spark tutorials [youtube.com]
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You have to start somewhere. For 12-13 year olds, crunching through real programming languages and rendering pipelines would be too daunting.
I see the problem though. If they later want to become real game devs, they have learn the proper attention span and grit to excel in the complex programming projects which games are these days.
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I think it is very likely the same percentage of the population that was writing BASIC when you were 13 is doing strange things with js and CSS today, and probably hacking into the router for fun.
However, its not a very big percentag
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I think you're underestimating 12-13 year olds' drive to learn by a long shot.
Or maybe you're the exception to the rule. Most people are just incompetent or mediocre.
Interesting. Could be several causes (Score:2)
Interesting result.
It will be interesting to see if any of the girls in the class go on to be the next Caitlin Colgrove, Adele Goldberg or Barbara Liskov.
However, I'd expect more of a bell curve in both genders with the average for girls being better than the average for boys. If the girls uniformly did better and the boys uniformly did worse, that sounds strange.
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I can't get to the paper, but it doesn't actually say anywhere that the girls were uniformly better. All subjects improved their understanding of computation, but the girls as a group did significantly better.
Just like young girls dominate other subjects... (Score:3, Interesting)
best boys (Score:3)
How about key grips & focus pullers?
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I've been 12. From experience, no, girls are not more developed at that age. That's the age where girls and boys take off in different directions. Girls imitate more, which makes them look more developed (and more well behaved), because doing your own stuff isn't quite as impressive when you can hardly do anything yet. They're just different, not further along the development axis.
A nice foil to the previous story. (Score:5, Interesting)
I like how it's been less than 10 days and already the editors did not think to link to the Barbie: Computer Engineer [slashdot.org] story, where she only thinks up a design and then has to go to the boys to get the coding done.
Ironic the fictional land of Barbie, with a supposedly positive message for girls about careers in tech, is more misogynistic than the reality it seeks to change.
Re:A nice foil to the previous story. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ironic the fictional land of Barbie, with a supposedly positive message for girls about careers in tech, is more misogynistic than the reality it seeks to change.
I'm pessimistic enough to believe that it didn't seek to change anything. I'm male so I'm not really an expert on Barbie but, everything I have ever seen and heard about "her" indicates that she's an unrealistic rich girl (or gold digger) that is obsessed about her body and possessing things and that the only thing she really encourages young girls to be is trophy wives with maybe an interesting side job for fun. I've never heard of anything that indicates that Mattel has ever truly marketed Barbie as a positive role model for girls to be body positive and self-determining of their own futures. They just give in when popular news pays a little more attention to what Barbie really sells than they are comfortable with because too much focus might actually bring about change.
Since I stuck my neck into this issue I just want to state, for the record, that women and men should have the same opportunities to become whatever they want to be, whether that be house(wife|husband), coder, combat infantry, CEO or President or anything else.
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The book was part of a series. They are trying to change her image, and failing.
Well, girls are better at programming... (Score:2)
My experience is that girls are more commonly better programmers than boys (I've worked with programming for 30+ years). The solutions are more thorough and well-thought in general, and they tend to be better at teamwork, and better at seeking help when they are stuck (instead of being stuck for four weeks until someone pokes them about it).
I've always been sad there are so few girls in programming, since they would do an excellent job.
And, for that matter, engineering in general.
That said, not sure what th
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I'm male. Interesting attack.
I guess I'm lucky, I haven't been in environments where "cheating" were a possibility - I assume you mean copying stuff and modifying it. The last years I've been doing embedded programming (ECU software, etc), which the few girls I worked with are really good at.
You seem to have had really bad experiences, if you drop the swearing for a bit it would be interesting to hear the stories and in which environments those people are.
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Exactly this. See the Barbie spectactle recently...
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Doesn't surprise me but... (Score:2)
That girls end up better at game design won't surprise me. They typically have a better understanding of human psychology and I believe that as tools become better, it will become more important than technical skills. 1
But this study say nothing about what will happen when these kids reach adulthood, or even high school. Girls start puberty about 1 year earlier than boys, with all the associated physical and mental changes. At 12-13, the difference in maturity between boys and girls is huge. Boys start to c
Re:Doesn't surprise me but... (Score:4, Funny)
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I started puberty earlier than my schoolmates but I still didn't develop socially as rapidly as the girls, probably because boys don't have to deal with creepers following them home from school asking them inappropriate questions as often and so on. I don't think it has as much to do with the hormones as with the way they're treated.
More Information (Score:5, Informative)
Fortunately my university provides me with access to the original study, so for those who are interested:
The study was performed on three elementary school classes with a total of 55 students (29 girls, 26 boys). Despite the small sample size, they did perform a statistical analysis and found the results to be significant (p < 0.001), the results being that girls on average scored higher on a computational thinking test before and after the course. The differences in improvement between genders was not significant and it is worth noting that despite having lower average scores before and after the course, the range of scores for boys in post-testing extended higher and lower than those of girls. I wish I could link the boxplot for the data but I'm not sure that's legal.
It is also important to note that the study was not performed in order to measure the difference between boys and girls in programming, but to measure the benefits of using their special programming software over an eight-week course. The software itself is indeed very visual, and the 'programming' is done by dragging around boxes with partial statements and filling in the blanks with object boxes. The software then constructs a text interpretation of the code in a lower box, which is what the computational thinking problems related to.
Re:More Information (Score:5, Informative)
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Thanks. This needs to be upmodded.
Big news! (Score:3)
Couple of thoughts (Score:2)
- Calling Flip [flipproject.org.uk] a "programming language" is quite a stretch. It is not. That's the whole point in it, in fact.
- The metric to determine how good a game is is not how "complex" it is, but how much fun it is.
Of Course they are (Score:4, Insightful)
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Girls excel at everything in school. Since the feminisation of the school system their is not a single subject that boys do not lag behind in.
Leik speeling or grammatical?
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Girls excel at everything in school. Since the feminisation of the school system their is not a single subject that boys do not lag behind in. It is impossible to compete when the entire system is against you.
Try making the critique in a way which doesn't put half of everybody down. What specifically would have been a better system for you and why?
The system isn't "against you." It just evolved not understanding you. So make it better.
Sounds more like Arts & Crafts (Score:3)
Give me a break (Score:4, Insightful)
If the study found the opposite:
1)- Would it make slashdot?
2)- Would there be some social reason given?
So seriously, why? Choosing 12 years old for the study- instead of 9, say, when boys and girls are basically the same thing- is a very odd choice, given the later development of boys. Choosing 15 would also give very different results. Generalizing the one point of human development when girls are ahead of boys is very odd, but why doesn't the article spend a million words saying that we need to help the boys get on the same level as the girls?
Almost every sex article- and CERTAINLY every gender one- is so political it's fucking insane.
There was an anecdote in a recentish book (sorry, blanking on the book) where a teacher noticed that the girls were doing better in language, and the boys in math. This bothered her- after all, boys shouldn't do better in math. Bothered her a lot, because, after all, she "knew" that boys and girls have similar math skills. Her solution was to segregate the boys and the girls math studies, based on the assumption that the girls were being intimidated by the boys, who held up their hands faster, etc. Eventually after doing this, the scores evened out or something, and she was happy that the world was exactly as she thought it was (after a lot of manipulation on her part). But, of course...
1)- Were the classes taught the same? If you care enough to teach math twice because the girls being behind enrages you, you are unlikely to be the most impartial teacher, right?
2)- If the girls being ahead in language and the boys being ahead in math enrages you because the boys are ahead, what happened when they split the language classes? They didn't do this part, of course- it was fine that the boys were behind in language. Not even the author relaying the ancedote seemed to consider this point.
3)- If there really is a better way to teach girls, then it stands to reason that there's a better way to teach boys. There's some gender zealots searching for the first, but shouldn't we be all about the second?
Anyway, back on topic, the program in question has nothing to do with anything, or real games. This study was likely designed from the start to show this, or spun that way for attention, and the metric for what "better" is seems entirely related to the "types of triggers" used. But I'm sure the rest of slashdot will poke holes in that obvious attention grab metric, and likely point out some more details with the NWN engine.
What would be interesting would be to take the scripted things and have them rated blindly by another group of 12-13 year olds.
Anyway, gender politics are so fucking all over the internet, and every side so zealous, that it's ludicrous to see slashdot dip their toe in it. I come here to read about tech, not read about some loopy gender warrior finding a way to spin their point of view (which is one of: sex A is worse at X, and that's society's fault, OR, sex A is worse at X, and that's because gender B is shining and perfect and obviously superior at X).
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Strict requirements? That's a silly thing to throw into some feel-good study.
It's not like anyone who grows up to work with computers will ever get more than "this is broke, fix it" or "just make it happen" as their direction or "requirements".
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Yea, if someone asked me to code a program, I'd just go with "Hello World". It's simple and get's the job done.
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Research by Dr Kate Howland (fem) and Dr Judith Good (fem)!
Can you smell the biasness and bullcrap from where you are? I rest my case. We will need a new study.
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Unless we're talking about NTFS.
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What, you have to do a complete double-blind study with thousands of people just to see if a hypothesis MIGHT be true? Or just to see what happens?
Here's how the real world works. You have a hypothesis. You design a test to try to test it (this is hard and you may inadvertently introduce an unknown that you're actually measuring). Next comes the exp
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You're unnecessarily snarky. He is perfectly right to question the science; the conclusion IS far too strong for the evidence and methodology.
This article shouldn't even be on /.. It should only be here if a proper study is done.
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The paper is about the use of the flip graphical language and their experiences with it as a teaching tool. The gender findings are just mentioned by the by, and have been seized upon by the popular press. (For obvious reasons. Certainly no made less obvious by the super defensive "But that certainly must not be true!" response from so many people here. Oh, /.)
Mind you, the primary issue isn't one of sample size (though yeah, ideally more would be a plan) but selection, and it appears that the difference be
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Gamergate is a crock of shit.
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Why did the editors let this crap through?
YMBNH