The difference between boys and girls

A study in the US looked at how girls and boys, who were taught using the same method, programmed.

Interestingly there were a number of differences. Michael Kölling, a member of the CAS group, summarised these as:

One relevant here: After teaching girls and boys the same techniques, and then letting them loose to create their own projects, there was a clear statistically significant difference in the kinds of loops used between the gender groups (this was in Scratch).

Boys used a lot more “repeat” and “forever” loops, while girls used many more “forever if” and “repeat until” loops.

“Repeat” and “forever” are essentially unconditional, infinite loops. “Forever if” and “repeat until” use boolean logic to deal with loop termination. In many cases where boys used the unconditional loops, conditional ones would have been more appropriate.

It seems that the girls mastered the application of boolean conditions in loops at least to the “Apply” level in Bloom’s taxonomy, while boys did not.

I thought that was interesting.

[One other nugget: Using Alice, boys' projects contained on average 20 times (!) as many fire animations as girls' projects ]

The full paper can be read here:
What Do Students Learn About Programming
From Game, Music Video, And Storytelling Projects?