It’s all about a malicious rabbit who is wreaking havoc on a city – he needs to be caught and appeased. It was developed together with Jugend am Werk Steiermark. There it is used for career guidance for girls. It is now also freely available as a download.
Choosing a career and training is an important decision. However, prejudices and attributions still ensure that many girls and young women do not even think about technical careers and especially computer science as a career field, said Philipp Einwallner, project manager of Jugend am Werk Steiermark of the APA.
Immerse yourself in professional worlds in a playful way with new technologies
In order to know what you enjoy and what you want to do professionally, young people should be able to gain experience in different areas. New technologies such as computer games or the use of VR glasses would offer new opportunities for playful immersion in new, unknown professional worlds and at the same time train users’ digital skills, says Einwallner.
Under his project management, the computer game was developed together with the Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science at TU Graz, in which girls are motivated to program during the game – without them having to have any previous experience in programming. Over the course of the game, the players are faced with different challenges that they can solve with the help of simple programming skills: for example, laying rows of bricks or – intended as an introduction to cryptography – solving simple Caesar ciphers. An avatar provides assistance in learning the basics of programming. “A large part of the whole story was developed in the course of several hackathons with our clients,” said Einwallner.
Low-threshold sniffing around
“Our goal was to get girls and young women interested in programming through a low-threshold first taste of the topic. If they find out the connection between input into the device and the visible output on an output medium, this can be an important impetus. to deal with the topic of IT independently,” said Michael Holly, project manager at Graz University of Technology.
The resulting game is used at Jugend am Werk in multi-user mode – i.e. with several players at the same time – but it can also be played alone, as Holly explained. Jugend am Werk has also gained its first experiences with this in schools over the past year: “Five out of 20 girls in each group have a spark,” said Einwallner happily. In Styria, it should be gradually used in all Jugend am Werk facilities in the area of career orientation, as Einwallner said.
“FemQuest” was supported by the Section for Women’s Affairs and Equality of the Federal Chancellery. The game engine used was Unity, which Holly said is free to use for non-commercial purposes. The download is already available for free.
