Sense-making of Digital Game Technologies (DGT): Positive Instances of Children-led Engagement with Chess

Abstract

The Game of Chess, a drosophila of reasoning, is a unique opportunity for nurturing children into systemic thinking approaches that naturally embrace the higher-order thinking skills required for STEM aspiration. In this paper, we conceptualise chess from a digital game technology perspective to nurture a rich system thinking experience and illustrate the various attempts to introduce a digitally immersive classroom experience for children using a generation of digital chess infrastructure. We continue to illustrate a few positive hands-on experiences of deploying generations of digital chess infrastructure for group learning in the classroom environment for nurturing both the learning and the social imagination of children working together to expand their quest for chess. We examined what brought the attention, advocacy, and achievement to build an agency for chess. With no prior value claim existing for the advocacy of technology deployment with chess in classrooms, the present framework shows how the attention to chess is progressively enriched. Further, the positive instances of children-led engagements demonstrate the goal of steadily integrating digitally immersive chess experiences into classroom learning environments. We make sense of the social imagination of classrooms and make in-vivo observations on children-led empowerment, shared aspiration, competency building, and the evolution of contemporary practices in chess leading to the agency for chess. We conclude that a transformative opportunity exists through deploying a digitally immersive chess environment within the classroom for nurturing systemic thinking in children with chess.