Teachers and Children Playing with Factorization: Putting Prime Slaughter to The Test

Teachers and children playing with factorization: putting Prime Slaughter to the test.
Last year the prime slaughter game was designed and implemented, to enable primary and early secondary school students to play with prime numbers and factorization, within two different game contexts: a 2D adventure game and a logic puzzle game.
The game design was informed by the results obtained in a 1 year field study exploring and assessing techniques for transposing dynamic and complex domain-specific knowledge into games. Empirical results suggest that children may prefer different forms of play, mainly two were individuated: a competitive form of play, which was mapped into the 2D adventure game, and a designerly-creative play, which was mapped into a puzzle game (Valente and Marchetti 2011).
This paper presents empirical results of a qualitative test, conducted with Danish primary school students and their teachers, about the evaluation of the current prime slaughter prototype. The test focuses on evaluating how our game fits within classroom practice, specifically in relation to how our understanding of different forms of play can support learning of complex knowledge in the classroom, allowing for sense making, individual engagement with the subject, dialogue with the teacher and other students.
The test is structured as a qualitative observation of the students and teachers while using our game during a regular lecture, and a participatory design session, in which we tried to gather new requirements to improve Prime Slaughter. In both stages of the test, students and teachers are involved in discussing their personal experience, providing feedback and suggestions for improvement of our prototype. The test was recorded and the video material is analysed in an interpretive qualitative way, based on the critical incident technique (Bitner et al. 2010), so to identify specific occurrences, which can be referred to children’s sense making and the emerging cooperation between children and teachers.
The goal of the test is to find out how to support learning of abstract concepts, from an individual and playful perspective, but in the social context of the classroom. We address questions such as: is there place for playful learning inside the classroom, privileging individual preferences for different forms of play? How does mediation of digital technologies affect learning in a classroom? Moreover, we are aware that our game needs to be developed further to support social play, hence results from the test and participatory session are used to gather new requirements, resulting in a new prototype, and to reflect upon the value of social-mediated interaction in the classroom.
This study is theoretically based upon the work conducted by Rogoff (1990) and Säljö (2010). Rogoff (1990) proposes the notion of apprenticeship in thinking, discussing how children learn new skills engaging into goal-directed activities with adults, who support them when reaching their zone of proximal development, defined as the boundary between what they know and what they can learn. On the other hand, Säljö (2010) reflects upon how mediation of digital technologies is changing our
understanding of learning, in relation to our mental and physical engagement, within institutional contexts.
The main contribution of this work is that we show how a computer game can effectively turn an abstract concept into a virtual artefact, that learners can then probe in a playful way, as well as study empirically, to explore alternative hypothesis circa its workings and verify them through experiments. This allows the learners to move from cognitive to more experiential reflection (Vygotsky 1978).
Guidelines are emerging from this study, and are discussed in this paper in relation to what we already found about domain knowledge transposition in games and playful learning (PLAYDT).