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DEVELOPING A CODING BOARD GAME THAT FOSTERS COMPUTATIONAL THINKING
THE GAME: LUCKY CODES
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 algorithmic thinking, strategic thinking, and problem-solving.
BACKGROUND
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 upper elementary school students.
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Learning Aspect: Help students practice fundamental programming concepts, including algorithmic thinking, sequencing, decomposition, conditionals, and loops.
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Game: Fun and playable with a group of at least four players.
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.
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.
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