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.

Analysing computational thinking in collaborative programming: A quantitative ethnography approach

“…The instructional approach stems from cognitive and social constructive theories that view learning in a group as a process of actively and collaboratively constructing new knowledge based on prior knowledge and social interaction (Kalaian & Kasim, ). The approach also reflects the notion that cognition can be distributed across a group of people, tools, and artifacts (Berland & Lee, ; Mangalaraj, Nerur, Mahapatra, & Price, ).…”

Integrating the Dimensions of NGSS within a Collaborative Board Game about Honey Bees

“…These types of activities may also be particularly helpful for students who struggle within traditional classroom formats (Barab & Dede, 2007; Marino et al, 2012). Furthermore, collaborative board games have been shown to engage players in computational thinking (Berland & Lee, 2011), identified as a scientific practice within the NGSS.…”

CTArcade: Computational thinking with games in school age children

“…Children playing various genres of games have shown a variety of CT patterns employed in their game play [2,7]. A formative study [13] also found that children playing a Connect Four game demonstrate various CTrelated thinking patterns.…”

“…Learning scientists and education researchers have found that children show a variety of CT skills while playing games [2,7]. However, articulating those tacit skills is a very difficult task for children [13].…”

“…The contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) We articulate an approach to developing CT skills through gameplay; (2) We provide a demonstration of the CTArcade system using a Tic-Tac-Toe game that implements a scaffolded learning structure; (3) and the exploratory user study reports findings with 18 children that show evidence that scaffolded gameplay in CTArcade helped them articulate more algorithmic thinking skills compared to playing naturally on paper.…”