A Comparison of Programming Skills by Genders of Hungarian Grammar School Students

Experiences show that boys are developing programming skills easier than girls in higher education. An analysis of programming skills by gender in secondary grammar schools was made with the help of a web based Informatics Test. After composing an on-line test on the base of the National Curriculum I analysed how effectively can students of different grades answer questions dealing with different subjects. From different towns of Hungary over 60 teachers used the test to see the knowledge level of more than 1000 students having answered these questions. After the evaluation of the test results the correctness of the original presumption emerged. First the Kolmogorov-Smirnov-test was used to see if the groups showed standard normal distribution in answering the questions. The means of the correct answers by gender were examined using a Z-test with two parameters and the deviation quotient was to calculated revealing how much gender influences the difference of means. Significance level was 5% through the analysis. Significant divergence by gender was found regarding programming skills showing the hypothesis correct in this two area. Students have to put everything in source code when learning programming. It seems this method is more favourable for boys. Girls have problems finding syntax errors in source code or understand it at all. I looks it would be better to teach girls with different tools using primitive building elements to write programs so when changing the parameters of these building elements no syntax errors would occur.