CURRENT
RESEARCH
DESIGNING A BOARD GAME THAT FOSTERS COMPUTATIONAL THINKING
DESIGN OVERVIEW
Board Game: CodeBear (Working title)
A bear adventure board game for coding education
Mission Statement: The mission of this game is to help every student with or without access to a computer to become familiar with coding in a fun way. In the process, students will practice essential coding concepts such as conditionals, loops, and debugging, and computational thinking skills such as strategic thinking and problem-solving.
Above: Simulation of the gameplay (current prototype)
THE GOAL
The big idea (i.e. humble theory) for this project was that a well-designed board game could help players become familiar with computer programming concepts and foster computational thinking in a fun and engaging way. To begin the design process, the “game core” had to be decided to set the structure and a concrete starting point. Using George Kalmpourtzis’ (2018) triangle of the three essential aspects of the design process (p.54), the initial goals for the players, the learning aspect, and the game were first identified:
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Players: Novice students, mainly of grades 3 to 6.
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Learning Aspect: Help students become familiar with the block-based programming language Scratch, understand basic programming concepts including conditionals and loops.
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Game: Fun and playable with a group of at least four players.
The current research agenda at this stage was to find out how a board game could be designed to resemble Scratch (an online block-based programming language) and also have the fun elements of a game. In other words, my big research question was "How can we design a board game that is both educational and fun?"
LITERATURE REVIEW
Computational thinking (CT) has become an important concept in K12 education (Wing, 2006). It has become not only an important skill for computer scientists, but also for children in developing their ability to solve problems effectively and efficiently, and to enhance their analytical ability (Shute, et al., 2017; Wing, 2006). Naturally, education for CT has nationally been recognized by governments and educators as an important skill for all students and therefore a necessary part of the school curriculum (Barr et al., 2011; Smith, 2016; Wu, 2018), especially through computer science education (Brennan & Resnick, 2012; Wong et al, 2015).
Many research shows that using games in learning can enhance students’ interest, engagement, and motivation (Apostolellis et al., 2014; Barab et al., 2010; Barata et al., 2013; Nah et al., 2014; Sitzmann, 2011). Accordingly, many digital games for learning CT and coding have been developed, such as CodeMonkey (https://www.codemonkey.com/) and CodinGame (https://www.codingame.com/). Although such digital games have many benefits in that they are highly interactive (Berland & Lee, 2011) and closely resembles the actual programming environment, such computer-based methods limit education for those who do not have access to computers or the Internet (Nishida, et al, 2009). Therefore, unplugged tabletop games, such as board games and card games, can be effective tools in classrooms, making learning accessible for anyone with or without the digital infrastructure (Bell & Vahrenhold, 2018).
Figure 1 Diagram of the three constructs
Table 1 Example literature of areas (a) to (f) in Figure 1
A sufficient amount of studies has been done on each topic - computational thinking, unplugged learning, and gamification elements, represented by areas (a), (b), (c) in Figure 1. As the importance of such topics has been approved, many research that overlap two topics (areas (d), (e), (f) in Figure 1) has also been studied and published. (Table 1 presents examples of literature on areas from (a) to (f).) However, compared to the unceasing popularity of the topics, there was a gap in the research where all three topics overlapped ((g) in Figure 1) which is where this research project aims to address.
PROTOTYPES
The game design process involved multiple iterations of prototypes development based on playtest feedback.
Prototype 1: Brainstorming
The first step was to brainstorm what the game will be like and explore the gameplay mechanics. The first prototype was simply constructed using markers, crayons, sticky notes, and small toys that my team and I could find in the room.
The basic idea for the game mechanic was to program robots to move toward collecting rewards and points. Each player can assemble code blocks (sticky notes) in ‘direct action’, ‘variables’, ‘functions A&B’ placeholders in order to make their robots move.
The game was simulated within the design team and major problems had to be resolved before moving on to the next step.
Problems:
(1) Difficult for beginners to understand what each placeholder means and which set of codes goes where, and had
(2) Lack of space for both the robots and codes
Overall, the game was not fun and had clunky mechanics.
Prototype 2: From One to Two Game Boards
The team had to resolve the two problems that arose from the first prototype. After a round of multiple tryouts, the solution was rather simple: adding a separate board for coding. This new addition not only solved both problems from the first prototype but also opened up many other possibilities. We decided to separate the game boards into two - action board and coding board - to expand the space for more movements and coding. It also resembled more closely to the computer programming environment where it has a separate space for the code blocks. Inspired by Scrabble and Rummikub, the team thought of combining tiles on a grid to construct codes that can be modified by all participating players. The tiles can have ordinary words that were also used in programming (e.g. if, move, turn, repeat) and the players would simply have to combine the words to build short sentences. With this design, the confusing placeholders were unnecessary.
The prototype was playtested to and received feedback from three graduate students of the University of Georgia. Since the prototype did not yet have a set rule, the feedback was mostly focused on the overall game mechanics of the game. The participants agreed that using tiles to make codes was a unique and fun experience. However, the codes that were actually used by the players were only limited to basic moving and turning movements. They were more focused on collecting nearby rewards, so thinking of ways to use more complex statements only seemed to slow them down from it without much benefit. The challenge of how the conditionals would be effectively included in the game still remained.
Prototype 3: Adding in the Missing Parts
Several research studies have asserted the need for gender equity in designing instructional materials for computer science education (Barab et al., 2005; Grover & Pea, 2013; Justice & Markus, 2010). With this need in mind, gender-neutral themes were considered and finally decided as “bears on an adventure.” In line with the theme, colored areas in the previous prototypes were replaced with water, grass, and pit holes. Rewards (honeycombs, berries, fish) and obstacles (rocks) were put on the board with physical objects (made with playdough and toys for the prototype) to provide a more interactive and tangible experience for the players.
The basic rule of the game was players will randomly collect tiles of codes and put them down on the coding board when ready to create valid statements to move their characters toward collecting rewards. The tiles were categorized and color coded into two types - words and non-words, with the intention to encourage players to make strategies more actively. Each reward on the board had different points, and whenever a player used up their tiles, that player received the biggest points (intended to encourage players to use longer and advanced statements) and ended the round. The player with the most points in total won.
However, now that the game had more content, many limitations and problems as well as the strengths were also more evidently observed. The biggest issues can be summarized as:
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There were too many rules to be learned regarding what each tile meant and how they should be laid out on the board. For example, the tile “move” was used with numbers to mean ‘move [number] steps forward’, and the “turn” was used with arrows to mean ‘turn to face [direction].’ Without the explanation from the design team, such pairing was confusing for many players.
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There was still limited motivation for using the conditionals. One reason could be referred to players’ frustration of having to wait until all the tiles were collected in order to complete an if-then statement, and another was that there were not many benefits for using conditionals rather than simple movements.
Prototype 4: Making the Game More Fun
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Multiple iterations were made to make the game more easy to understand and fun to play without losing its learning aspect. Regarding the game elements, various scaffoldings, such as more explanations on tiles and numbered columns on the coding board, were added to help the players intuitively know what to do without having to remember too many rules. One major addition was a mini-game before the main game which involved players rolling a dice and reading if-then instructions to place the rewards on the game board. This was intended to let the players set up their own customized game board that could add more randomness to the game rather than having the same game board every time, and more importantly, help the players become familiar with the conditional statements and what they would look like in the game.
Another major challenge regarded the learning aspect, which was motivating players to use the if-then statements in a more effective way. To resolve this issue, the words in if-then statements that used to be scattered into several tiles were combined to ease the frustration of the players in having to collect all the words, and more benefits were added to using conditionals that would help players collect more rewards.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
The project started with hearing about elementary school teachers having a difficult time teaching computer science to young students. As the importance of integrating computer science and computational thinking in K12 curriculum has increased, many teachers were also required to learn computer programming to teach it to students. However, as also supported by the literature, many of the teachers have been expressing their lack of confidence and being overwhelmed by having to learn and teach a new abstract language on the computer (Ericson et al., 2016; Thompson & Bell, 2013). So we thought, how about we make an unplugged board game for such learning, that could be used in classrooms to help both students and teachers feel more natural to transit to working with computers?
The literature review was done mainly in two parts: computational thinking and educational game design. (See the Literature Review section below.) This helped us understand what computational thinking was, why it is important, how it was being taught in K12 classrooms, the benefits of game-based learning, and explore cases and theories for developing educational games. As a result, there were no objections to the importance of learning computational thinking skills at an early age and the benefits of using games, especially unplugged games for a younger audience. There were also several computer science board games available in the market. However, most of the existing games had limited programming elements or a considerable gap between the game and the actual coding mechanism and were dominated by path movement through simple sequencing of directions than a deeper understanding of computer programming concepts. Therefore, we wanted to develop a board game that could bridge this gap and include advanced programming concepts such as conditionals and loops.
FUTURE RESEARCH
As I move on with my research, I would first of all like to collect data by playtesting the game with elementary school students when the situation allows. During the data collection process, I would like to observe how the students interact with the game, how the game design could be updated based on their feedback and reactions, and look for any evidence of learning that happens during the gameplay.
I would also like to examine whether the game allows the transfer of skills from the board game to programming with Scratch on the computer. Did the game help students ease their tension when starting programming on the computer? Did the game help students understand and use conditionals and loops in Scratch? If so, how did the transfer happen? If not, what were the barriers?
Another area that I am interested in studying is whether or how social learning happens while playing tabletop games. Do players learn from each other? If so, how? How could a tabletop game be designed to foster social learning? These are the questions I have that I would like to learn more about as I observe young players interact with the game.
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