MOL: Developing a European-Style Board Game To Teach Organic Chemistry

Recently there has been a renewed interest in the development and use of pedagogical games, as they provide an interesting approach to the appropriation of knowledge in the context of active learning. However, most didactic games fail to completely implement a cycle of reflection and action, thereby fostering mostly lower-order thinking skills and memorization as opposed to critical thinking and problem solving skills. This limitation can be traced back to the ineffective carrot and stick approach to game design that is widely applied in the context of pedagogical games. In this article, we discuss the development of a pedagogical game in which the game elements were carefully chosen to seamlessly merge with the desired chemistry content and therefore create an engaging and fun learning experience. In particular, in order to allow complex concepts to naturally emerge from a simple set of rules, we followed the so-called European approach to game design. The resulting game, MOL (Mastering the Organic chemi...