Learning to Play: Collaborative Board Games as a Learning Environment

 Many people engage in informal game play around a new genre of board games involving complex cover stories, resource management, and strategic cooperation. This project explores some of the learning and reasoning that takes place as people are introduced to these games and develop understandings of optimal play. This work is informative both to research on game-based learning environments and to research on cooperative learning.

Berland, M. W. & Lee, V. R. (to appear). Using Designer Board Games to Understand Distributed Computational Thinking. Paper to be presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Denver, CO.

Lee, V. R. & Berland, M. W. (2009). Distributed rule reconstruction in a face-to-face designer game. Games, Learning, and Society Conference 5.0. Madison, WI.

Also on this project is Matthew Berland of the University of Texas, San Antonio.