Carefully engineered playable games can serve as vehicles for students and practitioners to learn and explore the programming of advanced computer architectures to execute applications, such as high performance computing (HPC) and complex, inter-networked, distributed systems. The article presents families of playable games that are grounded in…

Proposes that to bridge today's gender gap in computing, prior approaches need to integrate appeals to girls' traditional and nontraditional interests, and focus content more clearly on learning about computer design itself. A test of this strategy obtained significant increases in the treatment group's interest in, sense of relevancy of, and…