Board Game Design by Children as an Assessment Mechanism in Kindergarten. A Case Study About Disability and Vulnerability

This paper presents the idea of a technology-enhanced board game, designed by students of a Greek kindergarten. The board game implementation emerged as an idea by the students, after their participation in a Skills Lab Project related to awareness about disability and vulnerability. Through this project students were able to understand that each of them brings unique experiences and ideas in the classroom and cultivate their empathy towards individuals with disabilities. The students had prior knowledge on board game design. In the classroom, board games are prepared as a part of a project, in which the children participate as game designers on their own initiative, depending on their interests. The goal of the study was to research whether the process of designing a board game by kindergarten students, based on the engineering design process, could also function as a tool for assessing and valuing the knowledge acquired by them during their participation in the Skills Lab project.