Blue Is for Boys and Pink Is for Girls: How to Break Gender Stereotypes with a Videogame

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an interesting study and I like it pretty much. A few questions need to be addressed:

1.     It’s better to specify the number of participants in each stage of the study in Abstract.

2.     Introduction is too long while Literature Review/review of Related Works is too short. Introduction should be brief: introduce the topic, describe generally what has been done on the topic, how it has been done and what is still not satisfactory, and state the purpose of the research. Then, move the other relevant info. to LR, and review of more related works is needed to substantiate LR

3.     “The Present Study/Research or Research Design, etc.” is better used as the subheading of section 3, Kiddo can be lower-level subheading. Otherwise, section 3 is unclear and misleading.

Author Response

For research article

Response to Reviewer 3 Comments

1. It’s better to specify the number of participants in each stage of the study in Abstract.

I have added the number of participants to each study in a clear way.

2. Introduction is too long while Literature Review/review of Related Works is too short. Introduction should be brief: introduce the topic, describe generally what has been done on the topic, how it has been done and what is still not satisfactory, and state the purpose of the research. Then, move the other relevant info. to LR, and review of more related works is needed to substantiate LR.

I have shortened the introduction, improved the related work, moved and/or erased non-relevant information, leaving a clear and direct text.

3. “The Present Study/Research or Research Design, etc.” is better used as the subheading of section 3, Kiddo can be lower-level subheading. Otherwise, section 3 is unclear and misleading.

Section 3 has been improved to avoid confusing the reader, the headings and subheadings have been corrected, the change of title has been accepted to improve the whole section and the section's schedule has been revised;

I want to thank you for your comments on the article "Blue is for boys and pink is for girls: how to break gender stereotypes with a videogame"; I have read and taken into account the 3 points to improve the article, which lead to a better understanding of the whole topic. Thank you very much.

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript describes the development and evaluation of a videogame designed to teach children about gender stereotypes and how to avoid them. An interesting and worthy initiative, my review highlights both major and minor areas for improvement that should be considered moving forward.

MAJOR:

1.     Flow of introduction and related work could be improved. It currently reads like it jumps around between serious games and stereotype literature (and especially with different age groups). I would recommend considering the flow of the argument to either improve the introduction and remove related work OR shorten the introduction significantly and beef up the related work section.

2.     “Formative evaluation with teachers,” section 5, is described in future tense, but data is available for these questions so that should be in past. Further, information about the questionnaire and where questions were adapted from does not necessarily need to be as detailed as it is. It would be better to just list the study and the questions borrowed/adapted from it in an appendix with the complete questionnaire instead.

3.     More information on the statistics used to group teachers in the attitude change is needed. Ditto to more information about the likert response options of the First section.

4.     More information is needed to understand how analysis of open-ended questions took place. How many analysts? What is their background? What was the framework used for this qualitative analysis?

MINOR:

1.     Subsection 1.1 in the Introduction should have a more meaningful title.

2.     Sections 3.1 and 3.2 share the same title and should be edited to reflect the section topics more completely.

3.     Further, the first paragraph in 3.2 is redundant and can be removed entirely.

4.     All punctuation that is currently outside of quotation marks should be moved to inside those quotation marks.

There are several areas for improvement given grammatical errors and awkward sentences throughout. I would recommend a thorough copyedit in the near future.

Author Response

For review article

Response to Reviewer 4 Comments

1. Flow of introduction and related work could be improved. It currently reads like it jumps around between serious games and stereotype literature (and especially with different age groups). I would recommend considering the flow of the argument to either improve the introduction and remove related work OR shorten the introduction significantly and beef up the related work section.
   1. I have shortened the introduction,
   2. Improved the related work,
   3. Moved non-relevant information from introduction.
   4. I have added the number of participants in a clear way to each study.

2. “Formative evaluation with teachers,” section 5, is described in future tense, but data is available for these questions so that should be in past. Further, information about the questionnaire and where questions were adapted from does not necessarily need to be as detailed as it is. It would be better to just list the study and the questions borrowed/adapted from it in an appendix with the complete questionnaire instead.

Section 5, the grammar and times used were revised to avoid errors in sentences, besides avoiding confusions on temporality.

3.   More information on the statistics used to group teachers in the attitude change is needed. Ditto to more information about the Likert response options of the First section.

We have added the description of how the points have been obtained in the evaluations using the Likert scale.

1. More information is needed to understand how analysis of open-ended questions took place. How many analysts? What is their background? What was the framework used for this qualitative analysis?

Section 3 has been improved to avoid confusing the reader, I have corrected the headings and subheadings,

We have added a section 3.5 where we describe the statistics and way of working.

MINOR:

1.     Subsection 1.1 in the Introduction should have a more meaningful title.
2.     Sections 3.1 and 3.2 share the same title and should be edited to reflect the section topics more completely.
3.     Further, the first paragraph in 3.2 is redundant and can be removed entirely.
4.     All punctuation that is currently outside of quotation marks should be moved to inside those quotation marks

Subsection 1.1 of the Introduction now has a more significant title.

we have fixed the error "Sections 3.1 and 3.2 share the same title" and should be edited to reflect the topics of the sections more fully.

We have improved the titles of these sections.

We have eliminated the first paragraph of section 3.2, avoiding redundancy.

I want to thank you for your comments on the article "Blue is for boys and pink is for girls: how to break gender stereotypes with a video game"; I have read and considered all your comments and have improved the article.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper shows how Serious Games can be used with school-aged children to address social issues using an interactive environment. The selected social issue is the gender stereotypes, that can be prevalent in certain cultures such as Mexico, arising at early ages. A prototype of the serious game Kiddo has been developed, based on four levels made to address four of the main gender stereotypes present in children in Mexico.

The paper presents the experimentation first results with associated comments. Experimentations, that included as participants school teachers and gender experts, and addressed first usability and acceptance then formative evaluation, with some success, even if some issues occurred with web connection and too old computers. These first results are presented and the way they will be used to improve the prototype, as this first experiment has also provided feedbacks from participants.

The research design, hypotheses and methods can be better exposed, the same for basing results presentation and comments.

Author Response

For review article

Response to Reviewer Comments

The paper shows how Serious Games can be used with school-aged children to address social issues using an interactive environment. The selected social issue is the gender stereotypes, that can be prevalent in certain cultures such as Mexico, arising at early ages. A prototype of the serious game Kiddo has been developed, based on four levels made to address four of the main gender stereotypes present in children in Mexico.

The paper presents the experimentation first results with associated comments. Experimentations, that included as participants school teachers and gender experts, and addressed first usability and acceptance then formative evaluation, with some success, even if some issues occurred with web connection and too old computers. These first results are presented and the way they will be used to improve the prototype, as this first experiment has also provided feedbacks from participants.

The research design, hypotheses and methods can be better exposed, the same for basing results presentation and comments

List of work done to improve the whole article.

1. I have shortened the introduction,
2. Improved the related work,
3. Moved non-relevant information from introduction.
4. I have added the number of participants in a clear way to each study.
5. We have added the description of how the points have been obtained in the evaluations using the Likert scale.
6. I have corrected the headings and subheadings
7. Subsection 1.1 of the Introduction now has a more significant title.
8. we have fixed the error "Sections 3.1 and 3.2 share the same title"
9. Section 3 has been improved to avoid confusing the reader,
10. We have added a section 3.5 where we describe the statistics and way of working.
11. We have eliminated the first paragraph of section 3.2, avoiding redundancy.
12. Section 5, the grammar has been revised to avoid errors in sentence tenses.

I want to thank you for your comments on the article "Blue is for boys and pink is for girls: how to break gender stereotypes with a video game"; I have read and considered your comment and have improved the article.

Thank you very much.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I appreciate the authors' work to improve the manuscript. I have listed areas for improvement below.

1.  I'm still concerned that details about the recruitment of participants from the first wave of data is not mentioned in great detail. Further, analysis of these open-ended responses is not mentioned. Who were the analysts? Their background? The grounding or framework used for analysis? The same is true for open-ended responses in wave 2. This is a major area for improvement.

Minor copyediting will be sufficient.

Author Response

Response to reviewer.

Answering your question about the information about the participants of the first wave, details were not repeated as all information is available in the original article “Acceptance Evaluation of a Serious Game to Address Gender Stereotypes in Mexico”, with DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-33023-0_20, since this is an extension of said article. The participants included members of the authors’ research group with experience in game design, analytics and gender aspects. 

“The first chapter of Kiddo was subjected to two types of early testing: the first was conducted by four serious game experts of the research group, each researcher playing the game independently, and all of whom had not participated in the design and/or development of the game. Their comments and suggestions were analyzed and revised to improve several aspects of the chapter, including: the design of some items and NPCs, the dialogues in some conversations, a better description of the gender stereotypes addressed, and some other minor suggestions that were incorporated. The second test was carried out by external participants: teachers, students, parents, video game players and non-video game players, with the purpose of contrasting the design of Kiddo, and evaluating its acceptance and usability for target users (particularly teachers) and gender experts, obtaining as many constructive comments as possible to improve  Kiddo's early development.

The first chapter of Kiddo was played by 10 participants, between 20 and 51 years old,

of different professions related to education and social studies (a social science student,

two high school students, a nurse, a sociologist, a consultant, an administrative assistant,

two primary education teachers, and a school supervisor) from Mexico”.

Regarding the open ended questions, statistical coding was used for a complete information exploitation process. The open-ended questions were analyzed individually. Some of them elicit yes/no questions, whose results were aggregated; while others elicit opinions whose results were manually grouped according to their content. This task was performed manually by one of the authors, and revised by the other authors, as the limited number of responses did not make it necessary to process the responses using specific software.

The participating teachers were personally invited to three elementary schools in the Avaro Obregón area of Mexico City, on the last Friday of February 2023, during the monthly academic unloading where no students were present. Due to the fact that it is impossible to access the facilities without authorization from the Secretary of Public Education; The application was carried out in a public educational center.

The authors carried out the different analyses needed for the study. As for their specific backgrounds, one of the authors has a Joint Degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, with a Master's in Data Science and a Ph.D. with extensive use of data analysis and artificial intelligence to game learning analytics data. All authors have previous background in the field of data analysis in general and, specifically, in the field of analysis of game learning analytics data. The senior researcher has extensive experience in the area of data analysis, in which he has led the data analysis part in several international research projects and carried out multiple publications on the topic of game learning analytics.

Regarding the language review, the article has undergone the official MDPI review and has been satisfactorily completed, the review number is “Certificate-english-70899”, even so we have reviewed it again looking for minor improvements.

I want to thank you for your comments on the article "Blue is for boys and pink is for girls: how to break gender stereotypes with a video game"; I have read and considered all your comments and have improved the article.