Gesture and Speech Interaction in a Game Tackling Gender Stereotypes

One of the biggest challenges facing society today is gender equality. At the European level, the European Index on Gender Equality(1) indicates slow progress in this area, meaning that it would take at least 60 years to reach full equality in domains such as work, money, knowledge, power, time and health. In this paper, we address this issue through our research on the Gender Game (GG)(2), an interactive, gamified, fun board-game, which contributes to de-constructing gender stereotypes and promoting science to a wider audience. It is rooted in the social sciences and aims to reach out to the public specifically about gender equality by presenting scientific results, mainly from research projects. In the paper, we describe an explorative user study with 72 children (8-12 years old), who played the GG. Their participation in the game was recorded on video, and we present our qualitative results based on video observations of the gestures and overall social behavior. These results provide insights into gamification and mobile computing.