Making Game-Making Work for Girls

Abstract

As digital game-making becomes an increasingly popular way to teach computational and design-based thinking and learning, educators must contend with gender-based differences in how students engage with game making. In this study, girls learned more from game making than boys, but that took some doing. Pedagogical innovation cannot be gender-blind, especially when it comes developing students’ essential digital and computational skills. Reported here is a study of grade six students who participated in game making workshops in same-gender groups. Using a mixed-method approach, we examined whether children’s pre-existing biases and previous experiences related to computer science and programming were associated with change in computational knowledge following their participation in an intensive 1-week game design program. We found that all students performed better from pre- to post, that girls learned relatively more from the program than boys, enabling them to both catch up to and exceed boys in pre/post-program assessment. We also found that prior programming knowledge had a significant effect on learning outcomes. Given boys’ historically more frequent and less restricted access to digital games and technology, this prior knowledge effect situates girls at significant disadvantage, one that educators need to acknowledge and address when using game-making as a teaching tool.