Share Paper: Back to the Gaming Board: Understanding Games and Education through Board Game Reviews

  1. Bret Staudt Willet, Michigan State University, United States
  2. Sukanya Moudgalya, Michigan State University, United States
  3. Liz Boltz, Michigan State University, United States
  4. Spencer Greenhalgh, Michigan State University, United States
  5. Matthew Koehler, Michigan State University, United States
Wednesday, March 28 1:45 PM-2:15 PM Whitney

Abstract: Recent academic research into the use of games for educational purposes has focused almost exclusively on video games. In this study, we explore player perceptions of board games with regards to education. We started with a large dataset of 7,806,486 reviews of 53,960 games collected from the BoardGameGeek website. We performed a keyword search for “education,” resulting in a working dataset of 1,978 reviews. First, we evaluated what games were being discussed with regards to education, looking at educational reviews per game title as well as educational games per subdomain and category. We also qualitatively coded a sample of 200 ...