There has been a major gender gap in the world of computer science, but researchers believe that designing computer games rather than playing them may actually draw younger girls into the profession.

According to researchers from the University of Alberta's Faculty of Education and the Department of Computing Science, high school girls had as much fun making video games as their male counterparts, particularly writing stories for the activities, which analysts believe could be a way to draw them into the computer science sector.

The scientists used a class control group in order to determine if girls had as much fun designing video games as boys. Researchers observed that because designing video games requires creative freedom, females had as much fun creating the products as the boys.

"The female students built games that were every bit as good as the male students made, even though the male students had more experience with playing games," said one of the study's authors Duane Szafron. "In terms of the quality of the games developed and the abstraction skills that the students learned, which could translate to knowledge of competing science - and in terms of the amount of fun that they had - there was no difference between the two groups."