Using Board Games to Teach Socioscientific Issues on Biological Conservation and Economic Development in Taiwan

Abstract

This research uses board games as teaching material to develop students’ decision-making ability and basic scientific literacy and to foster students’ value for nature and social caring by working with socioscientific issues. The board game structure contains four perspective systems: ecological, economic, cultural, and political. In the game processing, students must handle, consider, and understand the different role players’ positions and face different missions that involve socioeconomic and environmental conflicts. When making any decisions, students affect the follow-up game behaviors and develop tendencies. The board game instruction was field-tested with 38 high-school students from two different high schools. Students played the board game for a total of 200 minutes. Students’ scientific conceptions concerning biodiversity (closed-ended) and perspectives on socioscientific issues (open-ended) were assessed before and after the board game lesson. The results showed that students in both high schools significantly increased their understanding of biodiversity concepts, with a high level of effect size (Cohen's d equal to 1.40 and 1.06, respectively, for the two schools). In the semistructured interviews, the interviewed students were able to reflect on the value of animals and provide various opinions about animal conservation and economic development. Keywords: board game, decision making, descriptive research, game base learning, socioscientific issue.

Design Ideas for an Issue-Situation-Based Board Game Involving Multirole Scenarios

“…Furthermore, it provided an opportunity to train students to contemplate professional situations [2]. Moreover, this activity could strengthen participants' understanding of the relationships between various positions related to SSIs [23]. Students in previous studies also reported these effects.…”

“…For solving methods to be effective and consistent, it is vital that the participants reach a consensus on them [1,22]. Therefore, in some situated learning cases, educators assigned students to different groups in which each student played a role in addressing a specific issue to teach them how to reach a consensus [16,23]. However, the different roles assigned can lead to differences in the students' learning outcomes.…”

“…Simulating various roles in the same game allows participants to understand the involvement of their own and others' roles in the topic. They would also learn how to reach a consensus on SSIs [23]. Systemic situation: After setting a multirole simulation, we have to design a systemic situation which constructs the science-and society-based systems of SSIs using two features of the board game, namely procedural rules and feedback mechanisms.…”

Element Enterprise Tycoon: Playing Board Games to Learn Chemistry in Daily Life

“…Step 1 is to find out students' difficulties in learning chemical elements and the periodic table. Students often have low learning motivation because they do not know how chemical elements are relevant to their life experiences [15,16,18]. Therefore, in step 2, the researchers have reasons to decide which chemical elements and relevant information about their techniques and products should be selected for inclusion in the card game.…”

“…Previous research suggested that science board games should simulate students to apply scientific knowledge when dealing with life situations. Moreover, if the only topic that was gamified was the scientific concept, for middle school students who have studied only the basic concepts of chemistry, it is difficult to maintain interest in playing the games [15][16][17]. Therefore, there is still room for improvement in the current scientific board games in teaching the periodic table of the chemical elements.…”