The Magic Word: A Coding Tutorial-Game to Engage Female Teenagers in App Design
Bernadette Spieler, Naomi Pfaff, Stefania Makrygiannaki and, Wolfgang Slany

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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEducational Games and Gamification · Teaching and Learning Programming · Augmented Reality Applications
