Introducing Coding through Tabletop Board Games and Their Digital Instantiations across Elementary Classrooms and School Libraries

Introducing Coding through Tabletop Board Games and Their Digital Instantiations across Elementar...
Jared O'Leary

In this episode I unpack Lee et al.'s (2020) experience report titled “Introducing coding through tabletop board games and their digital instantiations across elementary classrooms and school libraries," which investigates the transfer of understanding when students begin learning CS through a tabletop board game and switch to a digital coding environment.

Article

Lee, V. R., Poole, F., Clarke-Midura, J., Recker, M., & Rasmussen, M. (2020). Introducing Coding through Tabletop Board Games and Their Digital Instantiations across Elementary Classrooms and School Libraries. In Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 787–793. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366917


Abstract

“This experience report describes an approach for helping elementary schools integrate computational thinking and coding by leveraging existing resources and infrastructure that do not rely on 1-1 computing. A particular focus is using the school library and media center as a site to complement and enhance classroom instruction on coding. Further, our approach builds upon “unplugged” knowledge and practices that are already familiar to and motivating for students, in this case tabletop board games. Through these games, students can use their prior knowledge and ease with tabletop gaming mechanics to cue relevant ideas for core computational concepts. We describe a model and an instructional unit spanning across classroom and school library settings that builds upon board game play as a source domain for computing knowledge. Building on expansive framing, the model emphasizes instructional linkages being made between one domain (the tabletop board game) and another (specially designed Scratch project shells with partially complete code blocks) such that the reasoning activities and different contexts are seen as instantiations of the same encompassing context. We present the experiences of three elementary school teachers as they implemented the unit in their classrooms and with their school librarian. We also show initial findings on the impact of the unit on student interest (N=87), as measured by pre- and post- surveys. We conclude with lessons learned about ways to improve the unit and future classroom implementations.”


Author Keywords

Elementary school coding, CS unplugged, computational thinking, expansive framing


My One Sentence Summary

This experience report investigates the transfer of understanding when students begin learning CS through a tabletop board game and switch to a digital coding environment.


Some Of My Lingering Questions/Thoughts

  • How might interest in CS compare with the following treatment groups: a) playing the board games only, b) playing the board game and moving into Scratch, and C) using Scratch only?

    • What about different unit that reverses it so kids start with Scratch and then learn the board game (i.e., plugged-to-unplugged)?

  • Is the purpose of the study to analyze the intended impact of the unit itself, how the unit was taught, or how students embodied the unit?


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