Abstract:

There is a long tradition of educational games and game-based learning, starting with the use of classic board games like Kalaha, Xiangxi, and Chess to train systematic and combinatoric thinking. These are highly relevant skills for the development of 21st century skills today, such as computational thinking and computer programming. To introduce computer programming for secondary school students is a prioritised initiative in many countries, and the idea is to achieve programming for all. At the same time as, educational games are a mainstream activity in many educational contexts and research studies have reported that many games do not attract a female audience. The same lack of female interest can be found in studies on the gender unbalance in STEM education. This study has the aim of looking at design concepts for girl inclusive design in educational games on computer science. Several of these concepts have been applied to a game called Critter Trainer, a game where players collect fantasy creatures called 'critters' which can be trained by giving them instruction scripts. The critter training is by purpose not called programming in order to give the game less of a technical feeling and more the feeling of fantasy and fun. The evaluation of Critter Trainer highlights several important features in the design of an inclusive game on computer science, but also several challenges that need further investigation. This study was carried out as a part of a larger design science project, with a focus on demonstration and evaluation of the game artefact. Findings from the first iteration of testing show promising results for the girl inclusive design ideas. On the other hand, there are still several traditional design issues and bugs left to address. Finally, as in all game development there is a need for several test iterations before the game will be a useful complement to programming education in secondary school.

Keywords:

Game-based learning, Inclusive design, Game design, Programming education, Computational thinking.