Exploring the Impact of Purposeful Board Games in Higher Education

Abstract

Especially for large classes where personal contact and individual feedback becomes increasingly challenging, educators are continuously developing strategies to get students to engage with the course contents in a meaningful way. Gameful approaches have shown promise to be used as learning tools for students to reflect on a variety of topics. The course Ways of Thinking in Informatics is mandatory and offered to first year students of Computing at TU Wien. As part of their coursework in the winter semester of 2023, each student played a minimum of two games designed for and related to the topics of Ways of Thinking in Informatics. Some of these games were created in previous semesters especially for the purpose of teaching the content of said lecture, while others were selected from existing, commercial games offering relevant content to reflect on. After playing the games, participating students rated and reviewed whether these games were a promising form of practice-based and in-depth engagement with a specific “way of thinking” and thus in how far this game-based learning and teaching approach for higher education was a successful strategy in introducing the lecture’s topics. Initial investigation shows that participants rated the knowledge transfer particularly high in comparison to other activities, as the game-based approach forced interaction and peer-level reflection. Learners who were confronted with a game-based approach challenged each others prejudices and reflected on their understanding. Along with the initial results of the data analysis drawn from one semester of this particular game-based learning and teaching approach, this paper will also present a case study of organising in-person gaming events at scale, which can be utilised as a guideline for other university settings as it shows how to introduce games as addition to regular coursework.