A Board Game to Improve Freshmen on Computer Networks: Beyond Layers Abstraction

The freshman student's perspective on the activities performed in a data center by the network analyst is complex and intricate. These activities include the configuration of equipment and the connection between network devices. There are several issues with these activities that demand technical knowledge. Questions such as: "what does this equipment do?"; "How is it connected to another?"; "How is it configured?" can be complicated for beginner students. Moreover, these technical questions are also associated with scalability, availability, security, portability, accounting, and costs. These resources require technical knowledge and also how to aggregate them into a network solution. We applied an abstraction set to mitigate these issues for first-year students and created the Network Analyst Board Game. This board game introduces students to the computer network field geared toward Data Center activities. The objective of this paper is to report this game. The students obtained essential theoretical and practical knowledge regarding computer networks after playing. A quasi-experiment was conducted with a set of students from the computing courses. After these experiments, more interactivity was noted among the students, resulting from the game mechanics applied. Therefore, in addition to increasing their interest in the area, the students elaborated more complex questions. The professors found that, after playing, the students presented more pertinent doubts during classes.