Collaborative Strategic Board Games as a Site for Distributed Computational Thinking

TLDR

Contemporary strategic board games, especially collaborative ones, provide an informal setting where complex computational thinking naturally distributes among players, offering a valuable context for studying in‑situ computational learning. The study introduces a coding scheme, applies it to recordings of three groups playing Pandemic, and offers qualitative examples of computational thinking. The authors coded the recorded discourse of three Pandemic groups using the new scheme to identify computational thinking behaviors. The work demonstrates that complex computational thinking can spontaneously arise during board game play, as evidenced by the coded examples.

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.