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Teenage boys are often stereotyped as the typical computer game players, but new research suggests that girls might actually be better at making the games in the first place.

Computer scientists from have found that girls asked to create a computer game tend to write more complex programs than boys do.

The girls also learned more about coding as they were writing the games.

Girls were found to write more sophisticated games and use more event triggers than boys did in the study

The findings from the University of Sussex come amid concerns that too few computer science graduates are female. 

In the UK just 17 per cent of those to graduate in the UK with a computer science degree were women.

Researchers believe that despite being more gifted programmers, many teenage girls are put off computers by the portrayal of programmers as nerdy boys on television and film.

Dr Judith Good, from the school of engineering and informatics at the University of Sussex, said it may be possible to find new ways of motivating girls to take part in the subject.

Teenage boys are often stereotyped as the typical computer game players, but new research suggests that girls might actually be better at making the games in the first place

She said: 'Given that girls' attainment in literacy is higher than boys across all stages of the primary and secondary school curriculum, it may be that explicitly tying programming to an activity that they tend to do well in leads to a commensurate gain in their programming skills.

'In other words, if girls' stories are typically more complex and well developed, then when creating stories in games, their stories will also require more sophisticated program in order for their games to work.'

In the study, which is to be published in the journal Computers & Education, pupils aged between 12 and 13 years old spent eight weeks creating their own three dimensional role playing games.

Boys can develop a rather unhealthy relationship with their games console, choosing to spend more time with it than they do in the real world in some cases

These were built on simple computer code, called scripts, that describe what happens if a particular situation arises.

The researchers developed a new programming language called Flip, which allows users to create scripts by connecting graphical blocks together.

Different events were used by pupils to trigger their scripts, such as when a character is killed in the game. 

The girls tended to use seven different triggers, almost twice as many as the boys. They were much more successful at creating complex scripts.

Boys nearly always chose to trigger their scripts on when a character says something, which is the first and easiest trigger to learn.

Films that portray computer programmers as geeky boys, like in the 1983 movie Wargames starring Matthew Broaderick and Ally Sheedy, are blamed for turning many girls off studying computer science at university

The research suggests stereotypes that portray computer gaming and programming as the preserve of young males are inaccurate and that girls are perhaps better suited to building the games.

Indeed recent research in the US has shown that around half of America's 190 million gamers are now women.

Dr Good added: 'Our results were encouraging from a gender perspective. 

'A substantial body of research exists which focuses on finding ways to motivate girls to engage with programming but few directly compare relative performance across genders. 

'In our study, we found that more girls created more scripts which were both more varied in terms of the range of actions they used, and more complex in terms of the computational constructs they contained. 

'The fact that girls appear to be using more complex triggers is encouraging from a computational perspective. 

'Furthermore, it suggests that girls are not relying solely on conversations to drive the plots of their stories, but are instead using events such as moving between areas or acquiring items as significant plot events.'

Not many female faces: Most of the computer games fans who queue up to buy the latest releases like Destiny tend to be young men and teenage boys yet girls may be better at writing the games