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Designing games from the ground up is a popular activity for helping students think in designerly ways. Despite their benefits, such game design activities may place higher-than-anticipated demands on cognitive and institutional resources. In an effort to alleviate these demands, this study explored how playing and fixing partially completed games may elicit engagement with designerly thinking. This paper reports on the results of examining participants' talk during a playfixing activity in which, rather than designing wholesale, participants mended incomplete or "broken" tabletop games. Results suggest participants focused on problem identification, demonstrated quick and sustained engagement with thinking like designers, and drew from designerly modes non-linearly. These results illustrate that broken games may hold potential as accessible alternatives for helping learners think in designerly ways.

In this article, the authors detail a curriculum unit used by Ms. Brown and a second English Language Arts (ELA) teacher, Ms. Smith, with their high school students. The unit centered on a comparative genocide framework developed by the Comparative Genocide Project at Arizona State University. The framework detailed seven key themes common across genocides and was designed to extend genocide study beyond investigating single genocide events. Students analyzed survivor testimonies from the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide for evidence of those seven themes. They also completed a "reporting form" and a graphic organizer as part of the unit. While this article identifies aspects of the comparative genocide framework that were found beneficial for the students in this study, the authors also make clear the limitations of this study and plans for future iterations of this work.

Purpose: This paper aims to explore how making tabletop board games elicited adolescents' design thinking during their participation in a summer game design camp at their local library. Design/methodology/approach: This study leverages qualitative approaches to coding transcripts of participants' talk. This study uses the design thinking framework from the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University as provisional codes to identify and make sense of participants' verbalized design activity. Findings: This study found that the making context of designing tabletop board games elicited a high frequency of design talk in participants, evidenced by both quantitative and qualitative reports of the data. Additionally, participants in large measure obviated constraints on their design activity imposed by linear conceptions of the design thinking model this study introduces, instead of moving fluidly across design modes. Finally, participants' prior experiences in both life and in regard to games significantly influenced their design study. Originality/value: This study highlights the unique affordances of making-centric approaches to designing tabletop games in particular, such as participants' quick and sustained engagement in the study of design. This study also highlights the need for conceptions of design thinking specific to designing games.

This mixed-methods study explored the factors secondary history teachers use to determine historical content for their classrooms and the degree of perceived control in decision-making. Through a survey (N = 260) and follow-up interviews (n = 23), we found that secondary history teachers in the United States ranked historical significance most highly in their curricular decision-making, but the extent to which teachers felt they were able to exert control over curricular decisions was influenced by required assessments and other contextual factors. Nevertheless, many teachers also prioritized student interest and relevance when choosing historical content. Interviews revealed complexity in teachers' thinking and additional context-specific (dis)incentives (e.g., fear of controversy) regarding curricular choices. Implications for teacher education and policy are emphasized.

In this study, we describe an activity in which participants play and fix broken games – tabletop games with ambiguous rules or mechanics – through the use of collaborative talk (CT). The playfixing activity provides a useful context for examining how participants think together and collectively build understanding through redesigning an incomplete game. We qualitatively analysed a small group of participants' talk as they playfixed a broken game, Pollutaplop. We examined their utterances through a framework of CT strands that included participating, understanding, and managing. Findings suggest the majority (54%) of participants' talk was collaboratively oriented and served mostly to manage game play and redesign. Moreover, participants used different personal pronouns to shift perspectives in collectively understanding the task. This study contributes to the design of future learning experiences that invite the use of CT and foster the development of abilities to co-design on complex tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]