Facilitating an Educational Board Game Jam: Analysing Different Game Design Strategies

This study examines how educators design co-operative board games during a one-day educational board game jam held at a Danish university college, with the aim of deriving practical principles for facilitating such events. Thirty educators, organised into groups of two to four, moved through ideation, board-building, and playtesting phases. Grounded in Design-Based Research and Schön's reflective practice, the authors, who also served as facilitators, analysed how participants named and reframed their design problems. A central finding is that groups struggled to balance simplicity against complexity under time pressure and target-group constraints, while playtesting consistently generated productive discussion among participants.

The analysis compares four groups' trajectories. One group progressed clearly from ideation to a playable prototype, while another stalled due to excessive complexity or an unclear framing of its problem, and a third focused on refining an existing prototype. Illustrative cases include an insurance-company group designing a game about post-divorce property division and a teacher group whose climate-crisis design drifted toward unwieldy complexity. From these observations, the authors derive three facilitation-oriented design principles: establishing a clear point of view, developing shared subject and game-design expertise across group members, and balancing game mechanics with learning content, such as removing quiz questions that have no connection to gameplay.

The evidence base is qualitative and drawn from a small local pilot, so the authors explicitly caution that these principles require testing in other contexts before broader generalisation. The geographic scope is limited to a single Danish institution, and the study is situated within game-based learning and teacher competency research. The concluding reference material, which contains no independent findings, positions educational board game jams within that wider literature.