Collaborative Learning in the Caribbeans: Onboarding the Math Pirates

Abstract

At the same time as research studies report on excessive gaming in online communities, the general mathematical skills are decreasing. The international standardised PISA assessments in 2022 showed a clear drop in math performance compared to 2018, with a large number of students in the OECD countries classified as low performers. Building on the identified strong motivational effects of collaborative gaming this paper presents a and discusses a design and development concept for an educational game on math. Jimmy writes something here on collaborative learning. A design science research approach was used to explicate the problem and to gather requirements for a multi-player game in pirate settings.  This paper presents the two initial phases of a Design science research (DSR) project as outlined by Johannesson and Perjons. In Phase 1, the initial problem has been explicated in a combination of a literature review and discussions among the authors. This was followed up in Phase 2 with the recommended definition of requirements in a combination of an educational game analysis and discussions with professional game developers.  As a member of a pirate member crew, players should carry out calculations to solve concrete problems. They do this in a virtual 3D pirate world on their mobile devices, in which they travel across the sea in crews with their own ship. The objective is to win pirate battles as a team, with each player focusing on their own specific tasks to contribute to a common effort. Each ship requires different functions, such as a navigator, someone using the cannons, and someone controlling the sails. This allows for interesting gameplay mechanics, such as different types of tasks connected to the individual roles. The environment of the game is either preset by the hosting server (a central instance), or configured by teachers. Teachers can create their own internal lobbies (pirate leagues) for their students, in which they can set different rules for the game, roles, and mathematical topics based on task presets.