  Recent studies from all over the world show that more boys than girls play
video games. The numbers are different for mobile gaming apps, where 65% of
women are identified as gamers. Adapting game design activities for academic
purposes is a widely applied approach at schools or off-school initiatives is
seen as a promising opportunity for all teenagers to learn to code in an
entertaining way. This raise the questions do special girls' game-design
patterns exist, and what can we learn from them? This paper describes a
girl-only intervention where girls were asked to create their own games. This
"Girls' Coding Week" was designed as an off-school event and took place during
summer 2018 with 13 girls between 11 to 14 years old. To explain the basic
steps of programming and to create personalized games, the visual coding app
Pocket Code, an app developed at Graz University of Technology, was used. The
girls created their own games with the help of a storyboard after receiving all
important information about coding. Qualitative and quantitative data was
collected through open interviews, as well as created artefacts and surveys
which refer to motivational aspects. The findings show that gaming elements
female teenagers tend to like, create, and play, mostly follow stereotypical
expectations. In contrast to our experiences in heterogeneous course settings,
this was not seen as something negative by girls. Furthermore, the findings
provided evidence for game-making environments for girls. Subsequently, the
results contributed to the development of new featured games to be used in our
app to inspire female users around the world to code their own games. The
authors argue that by understanding these differences in game design, we can
support girls so that they become game designers and thereby more interested in
coding.
