Systems Thinking in Designed Games

• In Event: Seeing the Bigger Picture: Supporting Systems Thinking Through Designing Digital Systems

Abstract

Many curricula designed to support students’ understanding of systems thinking target students’ ability to recognize and explain the behavior of systems, often focusing on biological systems (Hmelo-Silver & Pfeffer, 2004; Goldstone & Sakamoto, 2004; Wilensky & Reisman, 2006). In these contexts, students are positioned to interrogate existing systems in order to explain how they function. In sharp contrast, the modules that are the focus of this symposium position students as designers of systems, creating opportunities for students to learn about principles that govern the function of systems through their creative activity. In this paper, we present contrasting case studies of an implementation of a systems-thinking unit that used principles of game design as a key instructional platform. We explore the affordances of this activity and examine what systems thinking looks like in the context of a designed game.

There are many parallels between game design and systems thinking: to create a good game, a game designer must understand not only how game components (such as goals, rules, etc.) individually behave, but also how they interact with one another to create an overall system. The design process, which involves iterations of design and implementation, allows the game designer to learn about how the system (the overall experience of the game) is the product of multiple interacting parts. In a well-designed game, components have complex cause and effect relationships where a change in one component can alter the entire game as a system, causing it to behave differently. In our implementation of this game design curriculum, we investigated children’s attunement to interactions of different game components and their resulting understanding of those games as systems.

Data for this study comes from a classroom with fourteen students (ages between 10 to 13) who used the game design module for six weeks (four days a week, for 45 minutes). All sessions were videotaped, and students were interviewed approximately once a week to learn more about their game design. In addition, the games that students designed were saved with the goal of documenting change. For this paper we focus particularly on interviews with students about their games. These interviews were analyzed with the goal of looking for evidence of systems thinking through students’ explanations of how they had designed their games, and why the games worked as they did.

Findings suggest that all students were able to design games that had many components that interacted in complex ways. With increasing experience, their games grew increasingly sophisticated, and indicated a tacit understanding of how elements of the game interacted in the functioning of their game. A subset of students appeared to link these elements of game design to a more explicit understanding of interconnection, specifically, how the interaction of different game components made the game. In this presentation, we will share four contrasting cases of students who revealed systems thinking in their design progress and final products.

Authors

• Melissa Sommefeld Gresalfi, Vanderbilt University

• Sinem Siyahhan, California State University - San Marcos