Teaching with Games: Formative Gaming in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics

This paper, by Arwa Hussain, is a report from the special issue "Teaching with Games: Formative Gaming in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics" and examines how religion-based board games are being used in the education of children within the Dawoodi Bohra community, a Shia Ismaili Tayyibi Muslim group with roughly one million members across more than 40 countries. Using autoethnographic methodology, the author draws on her experiences playing the Lil Banoon games Triple Fun and Ilm Street with her two sons, reflecting on how the children perceive and learn through them and on the effects on parents and educators. The scope is focused on a single family's experience within a diasporic community, with supporting observations drawn from creators, reviewers, and social media communities on Instagram and YouTube.

The author's central argument is that such games foster creativity, offer children opportunities to explore ideas, and build developmental skills, while also presenting real challenges for religious curricula. Triple Fun's memory game proved effective for number and name recognition and helped her son memorize the order of the Imams' names, though it became repetitive and dependent on adult involvement. The strategy version demanded more parental guidance. Key difficulties identified include heavy reliance on parents, the tendency of children to experience religious games as work rather than play, and the mismatch between age recommendations and children whose religious learning has been delayed by inconsistent online instruction.

The paper situates these games within a broader movement of Bohra women creating religious teaching aids, driven by parents' desire to nurture faith in minority contexts where secularism and Islamophobia shape children's experiences. The author concludes that the phenomenon of religious play within Islamic communities merits further study.