behaviours to create an application for
learning French. There were also dress-up games and one racing game in
which players had to dodge obstacles.
The racing game was the most technically advanced program, but because it
wasn’t finished until after Games Day,
it wasn’t entered in the competition.
Smuts felt that all of the games showed
huge potential for sale, which could
enable the girls to develop entrepreneurial skills as well.
In 2013, Colin Webster, president of
Mind Sports South Africa, judged the
entries. He is involved in the adminis-
tration of e-sports in South Africa and
is currently wrestling with issues sur-
rounding the direction of girl gamers
and whether to run separate tourna-
ments or games for girls as a way to
encourage more female participation.
He felt that all of the games our students had created clearly demonstrated the aforementioned ways that girls’
game preferences differ from boys’. He
has also seen these differences when
he has taken girls to international
tournaments, such as Dreamhack.
Webster chose an interactive quiz
game for first place at our Games Day.
This game kept a running score as players clicked on multiple-choice answers
and told them if they were right or
wrong before moving on to new questions. He also admired how the dress-up
game entries were graphically pleasing.
Some of the other games showed a
great deal of promise but were incomplete simply because they were too
ambitious for the short timeframe—
something that had worried me considerably. While it is clearly advantageous for students to be ambitious and
push their limits, failure to produce a
workable game is also de-motivating,
so I tried to re-assure groups that they
could enter a “work in progress.”
On a personal level, I found the mentoring process deeply satisfying. As a
teacher, I found the challenge of having
to think on my feet and work side by
side with students to help them develop
their games to be far more rewarding
than sage-on-the-stage direct instruction. I’m not sure if any of the girls realised the extent to which I really didn’t
know the answers. But it felt like a personal triumph every time I was able to
help a group sort out an issue.
Was the programme a success? Did
it motivate girls to take IT as a subject
or at least change their perceptions of
computing? Eleven girls registered to
take IT in 2014 instead of the usual
three or four, and I would like to think
that the way we have promoted coding
and games design was partly responsible. I believe that if girls are allowed to
see programming as something that is
fun rather than dry and “geeky,” they’ll
give it—and all its benefits—a chance.
Dorian Love is an information
and communication technol-
ogy and English teacher at
Roedean School in Johannes-
burg, South Africa. He is pas-
sionate about using ICT to
enhance learning and teach-
ing, and he is active in promoting gaming as a
sport in schools.
