Under the guidance of Erik Harpstead, I am developing a board game designed to teach strategies for solving problems in electrical circuits to students in intro-level physics classes. It uses jigsaw learning to enable players to first learn high level concepts from each other, and then apply them in a competition to use them most effectively.

Our design process is heavily focused on integration within the EDGE framework for educational games. We used cognitive task analysis to define our learning goals; by comparing expert solutions to circuit problems with observations of novice strategies, we identified key misconceptions and common procedural errors. We incorporated instructional principles aligned with these goals (see Koedinger et al., 2013) and embedded them into the game’s mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics.

You can download the current version of the instructions here.