Introducing board games into coding instruction: An applicability study of first-time users’ experience playing the “King of Pirates”

• Main Authors: Chi, Hsiao-Han, 紀小涵
• Other Authors: Chen, Ken-Zen
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/5kzs89

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 教育研究所 === 106 === The rise of technology era in the present century depends on the continual innovation and progress of the digital software and hardware, thus pushes computer programming a new literacy of citizens among nations. In Taiwan, programming language will be introduced as part of the national curriculum in junior high school and beyond starting 2019 academic year. However, the implementation of coding instruction is still in question due to the insufficient preparation of qualified teachers, teaching materials, hardware facilities, and software packages. Even though a few alternative solutions to coding education - those are developed by communities or market vendors – draw somewhat success, many of them require additional investments in equipment, software, and staffing which make the solutions merely unscalable. In the light of bring coding education for all, this study analyzed first-time users of the board game “King of Pirates （KOP）”. The researcher qualitatively used participant observations, individual and group interviews, and documents to understand ten teachers’ attitude and twenty-nine students’ acceptance about KOP. Data were triangulated and analyzed in circulation to evaluate the effectiveness of KOP in terms of eliciting computational thinking capabilities. The researcher then generalized ways and recommendations in integrating KOP as part of classroom instructions. The major findings of this study were in three folds. First, students had a high regard using board games to learn programming. KOP helped learn the execution of certain programming statements. Moreover, the winning strategy that students generated throughout the game promoted higher-order thinking. Students also considered KOP motivational. Most of them had experiences using other resources to learn programming languages, but they still ranked KOP over other resources. Second, students comprehended and interpreted the conceptual elements of coding well after playing the game, while had a fraction of misconceptions. The game manager （GM） indirectly affected the way students comprehend the conceptual elements of coding. Students mimicked how GM explained these conceptual elements, but few of them were still confused conceptualizing the “If/else” statement. The researcher suggests that teachers need to offer students opportunities to share what they learned after playing KOP such that teachers could diagnose potential misunderstandings right after the game sessions. Third, most teachers had positive but somewhat conservative attitude about applying board games in classroom coding instruction. Teachers considered that board game reduces the time young children using electronic devices, and those children can still and learn about computational thinking concepts by playing KOP. However, board game needs a set of time to play, and managing multiple KOP game sessions in a large classroom simultaneously can be difficult. These valid concerns need to be resolved before KOP can be introduced to classrooms. Suggestions for teacher education, learning effectiveness of board game, board game itself, and further studies about board games were described in the last chapter of this thesis.