Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-tangled-web-we-weave dept.

Phys.org has an interesting article on a study from the University of Sussex that found girls to be better than boys at not just the story creation but also the coding involved in creating story-based video games.

Teenage boys are perhaps more known for playing computer games but girls are better at making them, a University of Sussex study has found.

Researchers in the University's Informatics department asked pupils at a secondary school to design and program their own computer game using a new visual programming language that shows pupils the computer programs they have written in plain English.

Dr Kate Howland and Dr Judith Good found that the girls in the classroom wrote more complex programs in their games than the boys and also learnt more about coding compared to the boys.

Now to me, simple under-representation has never been a valid argument for desiring more women in the software design field. Less women also go to prison; should we be trying to solve that? This, however, shows extremely valid and even capitalistic reasons for attempting to get more women into at least the game creation end of software design.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by b on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:35AM

    by b (2121) on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:35AM (#121005)
    Except Barbie. She's a terrible coder [slashdot.org].
    • (Score: 1) by dlb on Saturday November 29 2014, @01:22PM

      by dlb (4790) on Saturday November 29 2014, @01:22PM (#121088)
      I'm waiting to see how this gets modded. It's humorous, so +1 Funny, yet links to Slashdot, -1 flame bait (or at least off topic). Six little words, yet something for nearly everyone.
      • (Score: 2) by b on Saturday November 29 2014, @01:30PM

        by b (2121) on Saturday November 29 2014, @01:30PM (#121090)

        Haha… I did think about that. However, I don't recall the same story on SoylentNews, so Soylent should be modded down. ;)

        • (Score: 1) by dlb on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:10PM

          by dlb (4790) on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:10PM (#121104)
          Your post was funny, and I hope Soylent never gets so full of itself that anyone would feel intimidated linking to Slashdot.
          • (Score: 2) by b on Saturday November 29 2014, @08:55PM

            by b (2121) on Saturday November 29 2014, @08:55PM (#121164)

            Thanks, I did suspect you were being facetious, but Poe's law.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:36AM (#121006)

    It's not that girls are better at coding than boys. It's that the visual programing language they made is easier to understand by a female brain rather than a male brain.
    Run the test again, only with a standard language like C or C++ and see if the results hold true, THEN you can claim girls are better coders.

    • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:24AM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:24AM (#121014)

      I was going to say the same thing. Also, how complex a program is for any given task is a very bad thing. If they mean that the games were more complex and involved that's good, but not complexity for the sake of it.

      I've got to say I real, really don't want to see another COBOL, where lots of people that shouldn't be programming start programming. It takes years to clean up. There's still billions of lines of COBOL barely holding together that people are afraid to touch.

    • (Score: 2) by khedoros on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:28AM

      by khedoros (2921) on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:28AM (#121015)
      Or, test each gender with the language it shows the most proficiency with (or individuals with the language they show the greatest proficiency with, after trying several different types of languages). Programming in a visual language is still programming. If the only difference is the way that the program's instructions are presented to the programmer, then there shouldn't be any problem with allowing the subjects to use whichever tool seems to be best-suited to them.
      • (Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Saturday November 29 2014, @07:24AM

        by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Saturday November 29 2014, @07:24AM (#121049) Journal

        Except that visual programming languages are a joke and no one uses them for anything except teaching programming. Which they actually don't suck at [alice.org].

        There have been decades of work on visual programming, and the result of all that research is, essentially, that they suck. I think there's like one sort-of mainstream visual programming language out there that's used by electrical engineers or something, but I can't put my finger on its name. There are also GUI designers which are perennially subject to complaints that they generate unmaintainable code.

        How to "test each gender" to see which is "better at programming" does not seem like a very useful exercise. Some people of each gender are good at programming. The interesting problem is how to find those people and give them the information they need to make an informed decision about whether to pursue computer science as a subject of study or profession.

        • (Score: 2) by khedoros on Saturday November 29 2014, @09:24AM

          by khedoros (2921) on Saturday November 29 2014, @09:24AM (#121056)

          Except that visual programming languages are a joke and no one uses them for anything except teaching programming.

          Well, true, but these are general secondary school students that have to be taught a new language, not experienced programmers. Something that teaches programming quickly is welcome.

          The result of a gender-vs-gender contest of who's the better programmer would be pretty pointless, if that's what you're testing for. You'd get more interesting answers if you use the results to study the differences in ways that the different genders learn and the efficacy of different teaching methods than if you just try for a binary answer. In particular, what I'd like to know is if the way that we commonly teach programming has a pro-male bias, or something, and if females might react better to some other kind of teaching method.

          • (Score: 2, Informative) by linuxrocks123 on Saturday November 29 2014, @11:26AM

            by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Saturday November 29 2014, @11:26AM (#121069) Journal

            I did say they didn't suck for teaching :)

            Research into teaching methods is always welcome. This in particular [hastac.org] is unlikely to be the way to go. Although the mocking she suffered was unnecessarily vicious, she ... is probably not going to come up with anything useful. Read her replies to some of the comments; I think you'll agree.

            Alice [alice.org], I believe, is an attempt to build a programming language that appeals to a wide audience, including women, since the language itself can be used to tell stories. It could be argued that this is an attempt to "paint CS pink", a critical phrase meaning to change what the field is in order to attract women into it. CS isn't really about playing with a primitive 3D virtual world, so ... if someone goes into CS expecting to make fun virtual worlds with Alice, well, they'll be disappointed, and we will have done a serious disservice to a student who would have rather spent their time studying another discipline.

            I think it's possible to use Alice in teaching without running into this problem, but Alice itself is, under the hood, a fairly conventional, if minimal, programming language. It doesn't really "solve" anything except (1) be a visual programming language, which is, imo, REALLY GOOD for very very intro-level students and (2) provide a gimmick (make skits / primitive games in a 3D virtual world) to motivate people not interested in programming for programming's sake to care about the material. This is imo potentially destructive if taken to an extreme, but helpful in a non-majors class (where I'm using it). Gimmicks can be good.

            As far as teaching methods? Well, what people seem to be trying right now to attract women is mostly gimmicks like Alice. I think this can be overdone and risks being insulting when overdone. "You don't like CS but you like this stuff, so, here, play with this stuff!!!" It kind of stereotypes women, you know, by assuming that they will all be more interested in telling stories with Alice or whatnot than doing actual programming, i.e., the actual course material. I don't think Alice would be appropriate for a majors-focused CS 1.

            The teaching approach I use and I think most others use is not, I believe, biased toward one gender. I'm still learning how to best do it (and likely always will be -- you stop learning when you die), but I basically talk through hypothetical code with the students, focus on the fundamental concepts demonstrated by the hypotheticals, go through the process of creating demonstration programs in class, and assign relevant homework. It's interactive, because I try to get them to think through the examples and offer answers rather than giving them myself, and because some class time is used for the homeworks, although I currently don't believe in using as much class time for assignments as some other instructors I've talked to.

            I'm mimicking, of course, the instructors who taught me. CS 1 and CS 2, and on up through Data Structures, was basically taught with this approach. This was three instructors across 2 institutions basically using lecture, questions, and code examples to teach the fundamentals of programming. 2 of the 3 did a good job with this approach.

            There are questions and differences, of course: what to introduce first, when to introduce objects, when to introduce pointers versus references, recursion, arrays, etc., etc. What language to use can start flame wars lol. But, even after all this research, we basically teach it, well, kind of like a math class. And that makes sense, because CS is a really a branch of math.

            Once you realize this, the "how to teach it" problem becomes less unique to CS. We know how to teach math, and it's through lectures of major concepts, worked examples demonstrating them, and lots of practice. That's what we do in CS. And -- just like math -- it doesn't always work. (I'm of course simplifying things ... there are whole fields here, which I haven't surveyed completely yet, but I'm working on doing so.)

            So, back to the topic? Well, instead of "let's teach women better" or "let's teach men better" it's probably best to state the goal as, "let's accommodate different learning styles". And the method I just described might be better for some learning styles than others. But the attempt is there: you state the concept at the beginning, to give big-picture thinkers the context, and then work examples and provide practice so the detail-oriented thinkers who might not have really "gotten it" when the big picture was stated are able to build a mental model from the different, carefully chosen illustrative examples. For visual learners, you can illustrate code flow by putting code up on the board or screen and walking through the program, line by line, perhaps in a debugger. We already do this.

            And yet, CS 1 has universally high dropout rates everywhere. Even if you don't try to teach it as a weed-out class for the major ... it ends up being a weed-out class. This work [mdx.ac.uk] is essentially defeatist ... "we can't figure out how to teach the 30-50% of students who fail out, so let's at least try to find them ahead of time". Their work could be used to identify at-risk students -- that's probably the best way to use it -- but it doesn't by itself really help beyond that. It does seem that some people "just don't get it", i.e., really don't understand the material and end up getting left behind. Unteachable? Not likely. But perhaps there should be a "CS 0.5" or something for people for whom "thinking like a programmer" doesn't come naturally. That might be the best way to implement your plan, just go slower at first. Programming is really a much different way of thinking than many people are used to. They might succeed rather than get discouraged with a gentler introduction and go on to be good programmers. As far as I know, no one's really tried teaching a "pre-CS" course, but I think maybe such a thing should be tried. We might be losing people who just need a little more time to figure out what the heck the subject is about because they've never dealt with anything like it before in their lives.

            So, if I have an answer for you, I would say: a pre-CS class for students who find CS 1 moves too fast. It shouldn't be called "remedial" or anything like that to make people feel like they're "not as good". And it sure as heck shouldn't be explicitly aimed at women, not only because that would be horribly politically incorrect but because there is a very significant number of people of both genders who fail or drop out of CS 1 each semester.

            The one thing about genders and CS that is disturbing I think is that, so far, all of the students who have come to me and expressed the belief that they "suck at computers" or "aren't good at this" have been women. It seems like they are getting discouraged more easily than the men. I try to make sure to cover Ada Lovelace in the nonmajors class, to combat this, but I think it's really a deep-rooted cultural issue. And I can't be too obvious about pointing out how Ada Lovelace was a woman because, well, that's pandering, and it's insulting. It also plays into the stereotype. I mean, think about it:

            Instructor (to green-eyed person): "...and it's perfectly okay that you have green eyes! Many of the most successful programmers have had green eyes!"
            Green-eyed student: "What does my eye color have to do with anything at all?"
            Instructor: "NOTHING! That's the point!"
            Green-eyed student: "..."

            So I've been rambling a LOT now and I'll just leave it at that.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @10:43PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @10:43PM (#121179)

              Great post. Thanks for taking the time to write it.

    • (Score: 1) by Entropy on Saturday November 29 2014, @08:12PM

      by Entropy (4228) on Saturday November 29 2014, @08:12PM (#121161)

      Actually the headline just says "making", not "coding". Making involves a whole lot of things
      aside from coding, and depending on what one is making other talents could overshadow
      potentially poor coding skills, especially in a language like C/C++.

      C is cute and stuff, but having to deal with the detail of a string being an array of characters
      is a little outmoded these days.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:38AM (#121007)

    "Researchers in the University's Informatics department asked pupils at a secondary school to design and program their own computer game using a new visual programming language that shows pupils the computer programs they have written in plain English.
    Dr Kate Howland and Dr Judith Good found that the girls in the classroom wrote more complex programs in their games than the boys and also learnt more about coding compared to the boys."

    So this was new programmers using a visual language, and quality was measured by complexity.

    This seems more of a motivational difference than a skill difference. The amount of code produced in the first hour or so isn't a good measure of that groups coding skills. It may be a good indicator of interest and focus in school though. I wonder if this same difference (mainly in effort I presume) shows up in all subjects (reading, writing, math etc), or just this particular visual coding task.

    • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:30AM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:30AM (#121016)

      Studies have shown that the current schooling process is geared more towards the way girls learn, so motivation and interest could be a part of it. I would think that the type of language might make a difference as well. It would be nice to see more female developers, but I hate to think of debugging a visual language.

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:00AM (#121008)

    Another thing they're better at.
    But women don't want to let you have them.
    And have conquered the world.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @10:34AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @10:34AM (#121066)

      How is this offtopic?
      This is all about what girls are better than boys at.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:10AM (#121011)

    Women also seem to largely want to see some plot and character development in porn while guys are happy with just the highlights.

  • (Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:18AM (#121013)

    Doesn't surprise me one bit. I have often observed that in general, women will consider long term ramifications of their action more than men. Women, by and large, seem more preoccupied with family/society issues, while men seem to prefer immediate results and competitive stuff - especially things that do not require study, such as sports.

    Although I do admit women drive me nuts for their yearnings for things I see absolutely no logic in trying to acquire. I think most of this is just a test they are putting me through to see if I will sacrifice my resources for nothing more than proof of how much a relationship with them means to me. So far, I have failed those tests. I simply have refused to make someone else wealthy when I really wanted to put that money into residential infrastructure; I guess that is engineer slang for "I would rather have a nice brick planter than a 12 karat gold plated tennis bracelet that costs $400 at the jewelers and the corner gold place will give $20 for it.".

    Now the times I have seen women go for the short term is relationships with men. Relationship formation has to be the trickiest part of the human experience ( I have yet to master it... I am not even close! ).

    In the past, women have deftly deferred issues requiring strength or risk to men, and rightfully so as a damaged man is easily replaced, but a damaged woman - its not only her that's messed up but also her ability to spawn off and care for offspring.

  • (Score: 2) by gman003 on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:33AM

    by gman003 (4155) on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:33AM (#121018)

    This statement is of no scientific value whatsoever, but the Twine field seems to skew pretty female in my experience. Since it's a graphical/markup-based CYOA system, it definitely seems to be similar to the language and results they describe.

  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @04:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @04:05AM (#121025)

    I'm gonna make a game and you'll be able to talke a leak and draw penises and then there will be explosions and pigs and more explosions and the Olsen twins giving blow jobs!
    No woman could ever think of that!

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @05:37AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @05:37AM (#121037)

    > Less women also go to prison; should we be trying to solve that?

    Yes!
    By figuring out what problem is causing men to go to prison at much higher rates and then fixing that.

    Why isn't that obvious? Good it be that TMB is blinded by ideology? Nah, conservatives on the Internet tend to be more intelligent. It takes quite a bit of an independent streak and some world class critical thinking skills to break yourself out of the overwhelmingly Liberal echo chamber that is the online community. So it must not be obvious to people with world class critical thinking skills!

  • (Score: 1) by iamjacksusername on Saturday November 29 2014, @07:09AM

    by iamjacksusername (1479) on Saturday November 29 2014, @07:09AM (#121046)

    It is a shame the article was so light on the details. It would have been nice to know more about the benchmarks for complexity and what they mean by translating into plain English.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by TGV on Saturday November 29 2014, @07:26AM

    by TGV (2838) on Saturday November 29 2014, @07:26AM (#121050)

    Or rather, an experiment whose design does not permit the inferences. The result can be due to many confounding factors. First, there seems to be a lot of reading involved. Second, the task doesn't generalize, i.e. is not representative of programming. Third, the age group, 12-13, is one where girls have a considerable advantage over boys, and the effect doesn't necessarily carry over to later in life. Fourth, that there was a significant effect in one group and not in another can be because one group already had more experience and thus improved less, the ceiling effect. And finally, the greater learning gains were a trend, which is experimenter slang for: not significant (so even the very relaxed standard of p 0.05 couldn't be met).

    So: cute idea, conclusions cannot be drawn. Please don't use this in the curriculum.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Nuke on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:31PM

      by Nuke (3162) on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:31PM (#121080)

      It is well known that girls mature earlier than boys and are generally ahead academically around the age of puberty, which they also reach earlier. So I wonder why these (female) researchers chose this particular age group to study?

      There is also a great deal of cultural repression of boys these days, at least in Western cultures, even as the feminists claim that it is the girls who are being repressed. The effects of this are now showing through to younger adults. Hardly suprising that many boys can no longer be bothered with a challenge.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @09:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @09:49AM (#121062)

    If we follow the capitalistic reasoning...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prisons [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @10:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @10:37AM (#121067)

      Not a chance that will happen in woman cuntries (whole world now).
      Men go to jail. Women suck and fuck their way up the corporate ladder.
      Men never get the nice young girl bride they always wanted.
      Fuck these cuntries.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @11:44AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @11:44AM (#121073)

        You see this comment above me Mr Administrators/Editors?

        This is the type of shit that gets posted from stories like this, why don't you pull your heads from your collective asses and stop allowing this garbage on this site!

        I'm sick of it, it's actually worse than Beta at this point! Time to make up your minds, are you Soylentnews.org or 4chan?

        • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:24PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:24PM (#121078)

          Don't like the truth cunt?

          • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @01:44PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @01:44PM (#121094)

            I'm sure my Penis is larger than yours there little man, and you're probably the only cunt on this forum anyways MikeUSA.

            But keep wishing for child brides, they're the only one's who'd think you're well endowed anyways, lmfao.

            • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 30 2014, @06:11AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 30 2014, @06:11AM (#121216)

              Young girls are actually sometimes cute and pretty.
              Women rarely are. The ones that are are in extremely high demand.

              I hope you burn, cunt. I hope there is a war and you burn in it.
              Please Russia, make it happen. We need a war.