Learning from Designing a Board Game for Policy Thinking in Computer Science

"The Policy Maker" is a non-digital board game designed by computer science students in a Gameful Design course to teach policy thinking to first-year students in a "Ways of Thinking in Informatics" course. The game uses asymmetric roles: investors compete to form monopolies while a policy maker with a secret goal works to prevent them, reflecting real-world imbalances between political and financial actors. The design draws on the SGDA framework and a three-iteration playtesting process, situating the work within a broader pipeline in which advanced students create games for introductory computing courses.

The central finding comes from a first classroom iteration with 78 students who played the game, compared with 108 students who played other Policy Thinking games. Players rated The Policy Maker as more entertaining, recommendable, and interesting, and most agreed it deepened their understanding of policy thinking. The weakest outcome was knowledge gain of new concepts, particularly among students with prior board game experience, suggesting that the game's engagement advantages do not automatically translate into conceptual learning gains.

Qualitative feedback from 16 student comments reinforced the learning benefits while identifying two practical problems: complex instructions and a playtime limited to one hour. The authors respond by recommending that the game be introduced after students have studied the underlying topic, rather than as a first exposure, and that the reflection prompts be refined to better consolidate learning.

The work is situated within the literature on serious game design and game-based learning, drawing on research addressing the foundations of game-based learning, its connection to 21st-century skills, and its effects in higher education, alongside established game design theory. The scope is a single course context at one institution, with evaluation based on student surveys and reflections, so the findings speak to early classroom reception and perceived learning rather than long-term or cross-institutional outcomes.