Collaborative Strategic Board Games as a Site for Distributed Computational Thinking

Abstract

This paper examines the idea that contemporary strategic board games represent an informal, interactional context in which complex computational thinking takes place. When games are collaborative – that is, a game requires that players work in joint pursuit of a shared goal -- the computational thinking is easily observed as distributed across several participants. This raises the possibility that a focus on such board games are profitable for those who wish to understand computational thinking and learning in situ. This paper introduces a coding scheme, applies it to the recorded discourse of three groups of game players, and provides qualitative examples of computational thinking that are observed and documented in Pandemic. The primary contributions of this work are the description of and evidence that complex computational thinking can develop spontaneously during board game play.

Noneducational board games in University Education. Perceptions of students experiencing Game-Based Learning methodologies

“…Huang & Levinson (2012) assess the usage of commercial games such as Air Baron, Metro, Rail Baron, Rail Tycoon, Empire Builder, China Rails and 1870 to learn the planning of transport systems in civil engineering. Berland & Lee (2011) use the game Pandemic to analyse how logical and computational thinking processes of collaborative strategy games players work. And, Castronova & Knowles (2015) have changed the game CO 2 to explain and discuss the functioning of climate policies.…”

Situated Gaming: Beyond Games as Instructional Technology

“…Finally, while most of the examples from which I have drawn have concerned digital games, emerging scholarship around non-digital gaming practices is revealing equally sophisticated affi nity groups and practices (Berland, 2012 ;Chen, 2013 ). Because such games-in direct contrast to their digital cousins-lay bare their underlying systems rather than obscuring them as potential objects of inquiry, it will certainly be valuable to better understand the activity systems in which they feature.…”

RaBit EscAPE

“…Along these lines, Berland and Lee explored the CT that might be taught in the commercialized board game Pandemic [3]. As Pandemic is essentially a cooperative multiplayer game with a graphtheoretical representation of several major cities in the world, some implications of the involved CT concepts stem from the fact that the game mechanic is the opponent rather than the other human players.…”