Promoting the Development of Programming Skills among Girls through Serious Games

Serious games are games designed for non-leisure purposes, and specifically designed for learning or awareness raising purposes. Serious learning games differ from games designed for entertainment in the fact that they have been specifically designed for educational purposes from the start. In contrast, entertainment games are designed for fun; as a result, when teachers want to integrate an entertainment game into his/her practices the teacher may need to adapt teaching based on the game functionality and content. On the other hand, a well-built serious learning game is designed for addressing specific educational objectives and takes into account specific needs of the target group it addresses.

The CODING4GIRLS game approach educational objectives will be:

1. To prepare young learners to enter computer science careers by building programming skills;
2. To enable learners to apply the newly developed programming knowledge in wider learning contexts;
3. To build transversal competencies related to programming, such as analytical and critical thinking;
4. To foster positive attitudes towards computer science among girls and boys with the objective of promoting the uptake of related educational and career paths;
5. To raise awareness on the links between ICT and the real-world through learning scenarios that demonstrate how ICT solutions can enhance quality of life and address common needs;
6. To empower learners to think entrepreneurially for introducing solutions to real-world problems through design thinking mind sets.

This output concerns also the validation activities aim to ensure that the proposed framework meets the needs of the identified target groups in terms of relevance to learning needs, acceptance, usability, and effectiveness. These high level objectives will be pursued through on-going internal and external validation that starts early on in the project implementation period and engages representatives of project stakeholders. The evaluation will start early and will be on-going throughout the output implementation period.

Teachers' platform

This is a web-based platform where teachers can prepare their coding course using Snap!, follow the advancement of their students and access a public repository of courses created by other teachers.

The platform  is available at https://coding4girls.e-ce.uth.gr/#/

Teachers' Video Guideline - How to use the Teachers' Platform.
- It's available in English with subtitles in Slovenian, Italian, Croatian, Portuguese, Turkish, Bulgarian.

Students' Game Environment

A Unity 3D video game that the students can use to discover and complete the courses prepared by their teachers in a fun, engaging and gamified fashion.

The software is available at these links: 

• Windows: https://ctll.e-ce.uth.gr/downloads/c4g/launcher/w64/c4g_win.zip
• Mac: https://ctll.e-ce.uth.gr/downloads/c4g/launcher/m64/c4g_m64.zip
• Linux: https://ctll.e-ce.uth.gr/downloads/c4g/launcher/linux/c4g_linux.tar.gz

Student Game Environment's Video Guideline - How to use the Game Environment
-  It's available in English with subtitles in Slovenian, Italian, Croatian, Portuguese.

O2/A4-A5 - Evaluation through groups of learners and teachers and through external experts - National reports

O2 - Validation Report - Final Results