Experience report and data visualization to evaluate a game programming project aimed for girls using Scratch tool

The inclusion of women in technology has increased in recent years, but the number of women in technology is still much smaller compared to male involvement. Many factors make women not part of the information technology field. These factors include cultural, social factors of lack of information about the area. Thus, this paper aims to understand some of the factors that lead women to look less for professional areas involving science and technology. This article presents the state of the art of science and technology projects that have been aimed at women around the world. In addition, a questionnaire was applied in order to present some of the factors that can affect the performance of girls in projects in the field of Exact Sciences. Among the variables studied, the one that had the greatest correlation with the worst performances achieved by the girls was the absence of technology and internet at home. Furthermore, a quali-quantitative analysis shows the importance of carrying out projects that involve women in science and technology.

Exploring the Development of Primary School Students’ Computational Thinking and 21st Century Skills Through Scaffolding: Voices from the Stakeholders

Computational thinking (CT) has become a skill that is taught starting from an early age with its increasing popularity. In addition, the opinion that CT is related to other 21st century skills finds its place in the literature. The main purpose of this study is to identify the contributions of scaffolding-based game programming activities to students' CT and 21st-century skills. In line with this purpose, the study was designed as a qualitative case study. The participants of the study consisted of 16 primary school students, 10 pre-service ICT Teachers, and 2 primary school teachers. The research results reveal that game programming has a positive effect on students' CT skills, 21st century skills and some psychometric variables like self-confidence and motivation. In future studies and implementations, educators may support their instructions of programming through different scaffolding strategies. In addition, it should be taken into consideration that students can become innovative designers with content that they find interesting.

Game Engines and Implementing Music in Unity

A game engine streamlines the process of game programming by including an array of built-in features that allow programmers to skip the incredibly difficult step of developing physics from scratch. By using game engines like Unity or Unreal, programmers can use the objects provided by those engines, and with knowledge of how they behave, begin creating a game almost right away. Unity is one of the leading game engines today and is particularly well-loved within the indie game economy because it is free and allows developers to easily integrate their games across multiple platforms. This chapter dives into many different audio features of Unity and how one can use them creatively, including a discussion of all of the audio components available in Unity, as well as the mixing functionality. This builds a foundation for the following chapter, which provides a practical lesson on using programming to design the audio landscape of a game in Unity beyond the limitations of the engine’s built-in functionality.