Domain-specific knowledge as playful interaction: The case of Prime Slaughter

Starting from reflections on designing games for learning, aimed at providing a tangible grounding to abstract knowledge, we designed Prime Slaughter, a game to support learning of factorisation and prime numbers, targeted to primary and early secondary school children. This new study draws upon the design process of Prime Slaughter, to move further in developing a general approach in developing games, aimed at effectively conveying knowledge from a specific domain. Hence this paper will discuss the past design process, as a concrete case, and then formulate a theoretical framework, based on activity theory, aimed at facilitating the transposition of abstract knowledge into playful interactions, so to develop new learning games of this kind, also keeping into account children’s individual needs regarding play.