Water, Levels, and Loops - Evidence of Teens' Emerging Understanding of Systems while Designing Games

In recent times, there has been a surge of interest in both learning through design and learning systems thinking. Game design is well accepted as a rich learning environment [12, 25] and intent gamers, including children and teens, might be well-positioned to design games around environments while exploring both the context and the game as systems. We present a preliminary analysis of emergent systems thinking among teens who were making a board game about water pollution in a game-making workshop. Our findings suggest that through game-making, teens were compelled to think about both games and the context of the game as systems. We discuss implications for nurturing systems thinking as well as understanding of science concepts, and point to the affordances of non-digital games as tools for learning.