Playfixing Broken Games

Cortés, Luis E. Pérez; Gao, Yuchan (Blanche); Kessner, Taylor; Bernier, Jeremy; Gee, Elisabeth

doi:10.4018/ijgbl.309127

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 48 publications

(3 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The Q2L school represents a rather unique example of rethinking games, learning, and design processes, which involved support from both game designers and educational researchers. Another example is a study by Cortés et al (2022), which explores how adult participants are asked to "playfix" a broken game, where the players must eliminate waste material from various biomes of an interconnected water-based ecosystem such as a swamp, a beach, and a river. In the study, the participants knew outright that they would encounter design problems in the games such as ambiguous or missing rules that would interrupt their play, where there was no single correct way to fix these.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Students as educational board game designers: Learning opportunities and design dilemmas

Hanghøj

2023

ECGBL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Even though there is a long tradition for letting students play and design board games in the classroom, there exist relatively few studies, which conceptualise how students can learn through designing educational board games. In this paper, I present a theoretical model, which can be used to understand and inform how students work with board game design activities, and how this may require them to address specific dilemmas and complexities in their design processes. The presented GEC model (Games as Educational Challenge) builds on earlier studies, but is presented here in an adapted version, which focuses specifically on students’ game design processes. The GEC model is exemplified with empirical data from the large-scale intervention project GBL21: Game-Based Learning in the 21st Century (2017-2022), where Danish students (grades 5-8, age 11-14) across 19 schools worked with a design thinking approach to designing game tools that address specific challenges within the school subjects mathematics, Danish and science. The current study focuses specifically on a teaching unit with a 5th grade class, who had to design a board game that addressed challenges with toxicity in online communication. By using the GEC model as a framework for the analysis, the current study highlights three analytical themes concerning: 1) the students’ ownership of their presented game design challenges, 2) balancing of game elements versus subject-specific aims, and 3) the legitimacy of creating board games within the context of specific school subjects. By stressing both design dilemmas and learning opportunities, the paper contributes to creating a more nuanced understanding of how students address and deal with different complexities, when creating educational board games.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%