Participants of the GameHub project still remember Krakow in May 2016, when, thanks to Katarzyna Zofia Gdowska, they attended an exhibition of modern board games held at the AGH University of Science and Technology museum.
A year has passed, and at the Odessa National Polytechnic University, this pleasant memory found its original continuation when more than a hundred 1st-year students of the "Computer Science" specialty at the Institute of Computer Systems were grasping the fundamentals of operating system construction. Of course, the students needed to comprehend, for example, process management such as "parent," "child," "orphan," and "zombie," access control to directories and files in the file system, inter-process communication management, and transactional management of shared data in the file system. And for many students, this process of comprehension proved difficult, so gamification came to the rescue in the form of an additional assignment – creating an educational board card game in which a player, for example, must be the fastest to complete program execution in RAM, create the largest file system, or execute transactions with a minimum number of locks and deadlocks.
This assignment aimed to achieve one of the educational goals:
1) a direct goal of acquiring abstraction skills by transforming subject area entities into the world of board games, which is useful for future object-oriented design;
2) an indirect goal of obtaining a set of simple board game scenarios that could help struggling students learn the basics of operating systems.
9 teams of 2-3 students created their game prototypes in two weeks, designed for 2-4 players with a duration of 10-20 minutes, including a game board, tokens, cards, and a description of the game rules.
Examples of the games presented in the series of photos were captured during cross-beta testing with the participation of students from all teams. While the 1st educational goal was achieved by all teams, achieving the 2nd goal requires a methodology for metaphorizing the entities of the studied subject area into game scenarios, a methodology for choosing game rules, and, of course, multiple experiments in the student environment.
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For students of humanities specialties, the board game being created is already a finished product. Therefore, at the moment, the GameHub team, consisting of staff from the Department of Cultural Studies and Art History and the Department of Document Science and Information Activity of the ONPU Faculty of Humanities, is working on creating relevant training modules for the GameHub laboratory course. Naturally, for IT students, board games can become an effective tool for rapid rough prototyping when designing computer educational games in various subject areas.
