It was a pleasure to give a talk at the opening of Feliene Hermans’ Programming Education Research Lab at Leiden University. Actually, in the building where I bought my first personal computer in 1980 (supplied by CRI, the Centraal Reken Instituut). The research by Feliene and her group is about coding in schools. I was a bit of a white raven among the informatics people. I argued that both girls and boys can learn a lot from playing digital games. In their leisure, but also in the classroom. One should be aware though that gaming still is a gendered practice where most (adolescent) boys prefer ‘green-brown games’ concerned with sports and war, whereas many girls tend to play ‘pink games’ that are often about female topics in a stereotypical sense. For example, about modeling or shopping. The gender divide is not a dichotomy of course, given the massive popularity of Fortnite and Minecraft, a little while ago. I also included research by Mirjam Vosmeer (UvA/Hogeschool van Amsterdam). She studied mixed teams that were building games in school using the Gamemaker software. She found that almost all boys focused on coding, while the girls developed the storyboard and developed the promotion. Girls were also far more engaged with evaluating the games the teams made.
