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From Cards to Digital Games: Closing the Loop

This study is based on an iterative, participatory design investigation that we are conducting in order to create digital games that could be flexibly re-designed by players, without requiring programming knowledge. In particular we focus on digital game development, both design and implementation, for primary school pupils and their teachers. We propose a scenario where digital game development is mediated by tinkering with paper prototypes similar to board games. We address the problems of making sense and expressing rules of a digital game without programming. Analysis of our latest participatory workshop offers evidence that a board game can work as a tangible model of the computation happening in a digital game. Children understand the practice of designing games mainly as manipulation of features and behaviors of the visual elements of a game. We attempt at looking beyond visual programming, and rely instead on a tangible model of games supported by a minimalistic domain-specific language.