Towards a 3D Virtual Programming Language to increase the number of women in computer science education

Abstract

We propose a 3D Virtual Programming Language to provide an interactive tool for beginners and intermediate students. We believe that the direction of our research will help increase the recruitment and retention of women in CS. We developed an initial prototype and surveyed students to determine the figures that work best. Our results show that it is hard for CS students to provide clear 3D representations for programming concepts in some instances yet we were able to derive some common figures.