Students as Game Designers: Fostering AI Literacy through Project-Based Learning and Design Thinking

This study examines whether primary school students can develop AI literacy by designing an augmented escape board game on internet safety and artificial intelligence. Combining Project-Based Learning with Design Thinking within the Room2Educ8 framework, the work engages 22 students aged 8 to 12 in an e-course lab setting, with the goal of building competence aligned with the five competence areas of DigComp 3.0. The authors position their approach as a response to the scarcity of empirical AI literacy interventions in primary education, arguing that PBL's linear project structure gains depth from DT's iterative cycles, and that board games and educational escape rooms offer motivating ways to convey complex concepts to young learners.

The central findings rest on a pre- and posttest questionnaire of 20 items rated on a five-point Likert scale. Overall AI literacy rose from a mean of 3.68 to 4.31, and the authors report statistically significant gains (p < .001) across all five DigComp 3.0 competence areas as well as in the aggregate measure. These results suggest that sustained engagement in PBL-DT workflows can meaningfully support young learners' understanding of AI and digital safety.

The authors are candid about the constraints on these conclusions. The sample is small and drawn from a specific educational context, which limits generalizability to other age groups, school systems, or cultural settings. The study's scope is therefore best understood as a focused, preliminary investigation rather than a broad test of efficacy. Its contribution lies in demonstrating a concrete, playful design pathway for introducing AI concepts in early education, grounded in an established theoretical base of project-based, design-oriented, and game-based learning research.