Collaborative Strategic Board Games as a Site for Distributed Computational Thinking

ABStrAct This paper examines the idea that contemporary strategic board games represent an informal, interactional context in which complex computational thinking takes place. When games are collaborative – that is, a game requires that players work in joint pursuit of a shared goal – the computational thinking is easily observed as distributed across several participants. This raises the possibility that a focus on such board games are profitable for those who wish to understand computational thinking and learning in situ. This paper intro-duces a coding scheme, applies it to the recorded discourse of three groups of game players, and provides qualitative examples of computational thinking that are observed and documented in Pandemic. The primary contributions of this work are the description of and evidence that complex computational thinking can develop spontaneously during board game play. Steinkuehler, 2006). Often, these benefits are associated with video games and other highly interactive computational media. It is largely thought that the ability to foster a sense of im-mersion is a genuine strength of video games that distinguishes them from many other learning contexts (Shelton & Wiley, 2007).Still, there are reasons to suspect that some of the generative potential of games is not re-stricted to those that take place on a computer platform. At their most base level, games are systems of rules in which players operate on representations. In a computer game, those rules are generally executed and strictly enforced by