Boys' motivation through gaming - but what about girls?

The BBC reports that girls are not motivated by game playing to the same extent as boys, with only 40% of girls playing PC or console games compared to 90% of boys. I'll be interested to hear the research that my new colleague Derek Robertson comes up with. After new tech success on the MFLE last year, we are together taking on Learning and Teaching Scotland's further forays into new technologies for learning, with Derek bringing a great deal of background in games for learning development.

I'm convinced that gaming has a lot to offer, and this weekend even uttered the words: "This'll be great for those lads who hate turning up to school." At the time I was engrossed in making up copycat activities ressembling the brain gym type games on the Nintendo DS. I relied on Mrs Edublogger's fascination with the French language version of Dr Kawashima's Brain Age to reassure myself that girls would be equally branché-ed by gaming but the BBC article opens a big question: is gaming in education only going to appeal to the male classroom population? I wonder what types of games will get the girls cheering along, too.

I remember Marc Prensky drawing on the same distinction in his keynote speech, handily podcast on this blog, where he was saying that we should "do whatever we need to: games to get the boys going, mobile phones to get the girls going." Right enough, at the back of the room the schoolkids present cheered on each cue. Maybe mobile phone technology is the way to go for the other half. Yet another thing to add to the research list when Derek and I head dan saff to the Handheld Learning Conference in October.

Comments

[Steve Beard]

There are several games that I believe motivate girls, and I also think this is a huge area of development for the gaming industry. Games which stand out straight away are SIMS, PC Dance Mat, a variety of sports simulations including golf, tennis and football.

Maybe we need to get girls to write their own computer games using Gamemaker or MissionMaker software.

[Jeanette Wiens-Peckham]

This site is one of my favorites about boys and literacy. It states that girls are ahead of boys in the literacy of school but behind boys in the literacy of work and home (including tech skills). It is interesting how much literacy skills are linked to technological literacy skills.

The site was developed by profs at U of A who studied a group of boys and their out of school literacy skills.

Boys and Literacy

My own site:

BrainBasedBloggin