Developing kindergarten students’ game design skills by teaching game design through organized game design interventions

Abstract

Developing students’ game design skills and the process of teaching game design acquire increasing research interest. The aim of this study was to (a) examine the impact of game design teaching interventions to kindergarten students and (b) examine the design of such interventions for teaching game design to students of this age. In that regard, this paper presents a teaching experiment, conducted with students in the early childhood. The experiment followed a quasi-experimental design, with a pre-test and a post-test and a focus and control groups. For a period of three months, only the focus group was presented with participatory game design activities while the control group followed the standard curriculum. During those interventions, students of the focus group worked on designing educational games about teaching pre-algebraic patterning to their peers. A mixed methods analysis was applied to analyze the results, which suggest that the facilitation of participatory game design activities has a positive impact on the development of game design skills. Additionally, this paper elaborates on issues that emerged through the study related to collaborative and individual work of students, difficulties in focusing on designing educational games and diversity of game proposals.