Effectiveness of AR Board Game on Computational Thinking and Programming Skills for Elementary School Students

This study integrated the augmented reality (AR) technology into the "Coding Ocean" board game to provide players with real-time simulation of ship paths and learning scaffolds. Combined with Scratch block-based programming, an interactive learning environment is developed to assist elementary school students in learning coding skills from the unplugged board game to enhance their computational thinking concepts. The AR board game is focused on the programming concepts of sequential, and/or and loop. Through the process of treasure hunting, the basic concepts of computational thinking can be developed, i.e., abstraction, problem decomposition, pattern recognition and algorithmic thinking. In order to investigate the learning effectiveness of the AR board game on computational thinking and programming skills, a number of 51 third graders from an elementary school were recruited as research samples. The experimental group (n = 26) used the AR board game and the control group (n = 25) used the traditional board game for game-based learning. The experimental results indicate: (1) the learning effectiveness of computational thinking for the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group; (2) the learning achievement of the block-based programming skills for the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group; (3) the cognitive load of the experimental group was significantly lower than that of the control group. The AR technology can combine the unplugged board games with plugged learning modules to assist students in game-based learning, which is useful for enhancing computational thinking abilities while reducing the cognitive load.