The Magic Word: A Coding Tutorial-Game to Engage Female Teenagers in App Design

TL;DR

This paper presents the development and testing of a gender-sensitive educational coding game designed specifically for female teenagers, involving early user feedback to enhance engagement and learning.

Contribution

It introduces a tutorial game tailored for female teenagers, developed with early involvement of girls and based on surveys and focus groups, to address gender-specific preferences in educational app design.

Findings

Positive feedback from initial prototype testing

Effective engagement of female teenagers in coding tasks

Successful integration into the Luna&Cat app

Abstract

Educational games are commonly used to motivate students and provide enhanced learning opportunities. Apps and mobile games play an increasingly important role in education and smartphones are part of the daily lives of most female teenagers: Half of mobile gamers are women and 64% of women prefer smartphones to other platforms. However, gender differences in playing behaviour and preferences raises concerns about potential gender inequalities when games are developed for education. In order to develop a tutorial game that suits the female target group and provides challenging tasks to solve, girls were involved at a very early stage of the development cycle and the idea was developed on the basis of surveys and focus group discussions. A first prototype of the game has been tested in a mixed-gender group to get feedback about the learning content, the worked examples, and the whole structure of the game. Finally, a tutorial game with six worked examples has been released in our Luna&Cat app, a programming tool that has been designed for our female target group in particular.