A recent study conducted in the UK with a group of teen boys and girls revealed that girls are better skilled to develop more complex games, a finding that would probably rattle the cages of many sexist males who have been trolling female developers lately.

A group of 12- and 13-year-olds took part in the University of Sussex study conducted by the Informatics department over two months where they had to create 3D role-playing games using a programme called Flip. Flip was created by Dr Kate Howland and Dr Judith Good (from the university) and uses a visual editor and plain English translation to help pupils program their games, and software that’s openly available through popular role-playing game Neverwinter Nights 2.

According to Howland and Good, the girls were able to write more complex programs in their games than the boys and also learnt more about coding compared to the boys, who nearly always chose to trigger their scripts on when a character says something, which is the first and easiest trigger to learn.

“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.”

Researchers say the study suggests that girls can be motivated to explore programming and create better gaming experiences by building on these existing literary skills.

[Source – University of Sussex via The Telegraph, Image – Shutterstock]