  In recent decades, computer science (CS) has undergone remarkable growth and
diversification. Creating attractive, social, or hands-on games has already
been identified as a possible approach to get teenagers and young adults
interested in CS. However, overcoming the global gap between the interest and
participation of men and women in CS is still a worldwide problem. To address
this challenge, we present a multiplayer game that is used in a workshop
setting to motivate girls to program through a 3D game environment. The paper
aims to expand the educational landscape within computer science education by
offering a motivating and engaging platform for young women to explore
programming quests in a collaborative environment. The study involved 235 girls
and 50 coaches for the workshop evaluation and a subset of 20 participants for
an in-game analysis. In this paper, we explore the engagement in programming
and assess the cognitive workload while playing and solving programming quests
within the game, as well as the learning experience and the outcome. The
results show that the positive outcomes of the workshop underscore the
effectiveness of a game-based collaborative learning approach to get girls
interested in computer science activities. The variety of solutions found for
the different tasks demonstrates the creativity and problem-solving skills of
the participants and underlines the effectiveness of the workshop in promoting
critical thinking and computational skills.
