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The main objective of this project is to use the highly motivating features of videogames to promote interest in coding in young people, and especially in girls. Videogames have a set of characteristics such as proposing challenging goals in scenarios where players need to discover the rules with high interactivity, and immediate feedback that achieve a great player engagement. We believe that these characteristics can be effectively used to increase the interest in coding and the computational thinking skills of young people. By using an alternative language that is very close to them such as videogames, we can change the perception that young people have breaking the stereotype that coding is only for male nerds and attract a wider audience.
In Europe it is critical to use new approaches to attract more younger students to coding and especially girls before they accept the biased gender stereotype avoiding to choose ICT related studies. The number of ICT specialists in the EU grew by 40.0 % from 2011 to 2019, over 6 times as high as the increase (6.9 %) for total employment. In 2019, 82.1 % of men were employed as ICT specialists in the EU against 17.9 % of women. This statistics will be updated in july 2021 but no improvement in the women participation in ICT is expected (obtained from https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/ICT_specialists_in_employment. Bringing more women into EU digital sector would benefit the EU economy and we consider that early attraction to coding could be a way to increase that number , and to fight the gender divide in Europe’s ICT education and labour market.