Board Game Play as an Unplugged-to-Plugged and Expansively Framed Strategy for Making Computing Education More Accessible (Poster 8)

• In Event: Design Principles for Creating Accessible and Inclusive Introductory Computing Experiences

Abstract

“Unplugged” computer science education – the use of non-digital materials and activities to teach computing concepts – represents its own specialized sub-genre of interest in the computing education community. The presence of unplugged computing examples in instructional settings range from the demonstration of algorithms through simulated peanut butter and jelly sandwich making to physically acting out programmable agent behaviors using our own bodies (e.g., Smith, Berland, & Martin, 2015) to showing how computing ideas are embedded in crafts (e.g., Eisenberg, 2010). We build upon unplugged computing research that has situated computing ideas and practices in tabletop board game play (Berland & Lee, 2011) and extended it as an instructional model based on Engle et al’s (2012) theory of expansive framing for transfer. This model, “expansively-framed unplugged” (EfU), is an approach to starting computer science instruction through analog board game play and using that as base knowledge for learning computational thinking ideas such as abstraction, debugging, and algorithms.
With funding from the National Science Foundation, we designed and enacted a 7-8 lesson curricular unit that was implemented and iteratively refined over two years in rural fifth grade classrooms and school libraries (Blinded, 2020). In recent years, computer science themed educational board games have appeared commercially (Poole et al., 2021) and are similar to a number of tabletop board games that students often play during recreational periods in their school libraries (Lee et al., 2018). Expansive framing theory seeks to model transfer as the reframing of disparate contexts into a single unified frame so that ideas situated within one context get extended throughout the entire frame. Stated more directly, a student who encounters an idea related to computing while playing a board game (context 1) will broaden the reach of that idea to a context where they are doing computer programming in a programming environment (context 2). Specific instructional decisions related to sequences and activities are made to help pair the disparate contexts and promote connections so that the combination of both contexts are seen as an instance of computing. Two pairs of disparate contexts were involved; Pair 1 was the classroom and the library. Pair 2 was the analog tabletop board game and the Scratch programming environment.
In this poster, we share the key design ideas related to expansively-framed unplugged design (Blinded, 2019) and some of the impacts that this had on student learning and participation. An especially important design idea was the decision to integrate student authorship activities to encourage connections and engagement. With respect to student learning, we saw gains in terms of students’ expressing computational ideas and cases of students who historically did not feel connected to computing as typically presented in screen-based coding activities find new entry points that they found exciting and empowering (Shehzad et al., 2022). Similar to computing pedagogy design work in other areas, such as electronic textiles (e.g., Buechley et al., 2013), using unplugged and familiar activities like analog board game play does serve to change the initial image of who does computing and create access for more participation.

Authors

• Victor R. Lee, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Umar Shehzad, Utah State University
  Presenting Author

• Jody E. Clarke-Midura, Utah State University
  Presenting Author

• Mimi M. Recker, Utah State University
  Presenting Author