Abstract:

Children need to play and their growth process is affected by their childhood games and entertainments. One of the main challenges in the field of educational games is the implicit users’ game experience. To face this challenge, an exploratory study by using a drawing-based board game is presented to children. Drawing is both interesting and instructive. It can be used as a dynamic and innovative tool in game design. The teacher’s or parent’s task is to find and exploit the creative capacities of the children. Working and developing the children’s creativity also implies knowing their creative potential that intermingles with their intellectual features. The techniques that the teacher/parent uses in order to educate the children’s creative potential are different. One of them is the freedom of letting children express themselves in order to discover their creative thoughts through drawing. This might happen when the child knows to connect meanings, to make associations and to find answers to his questions. Each creative act starts with questions that have to be meaningful and reasonable. The question is the one that provokes the creative behavior and the one that leads to the development of the child’s curiosity. This board game allows children the creation of their own characters without the need for software or hardware materials. It provides the possibility of sharing the creations with other children, modify and even improve them. When children play, their perception increases and their psychological, emotional and physical abilities can be at their highest level in areas where they can play freely. This work aimed at testing an alternative and innovative way to engage children through creative drawing. An informal education activity focusing on drawing dynamics was designed for 8-14 years children. It combines character design concepts (head, eyes, mouth, nose,…), storytelling techniques (narration, image, sound,…), and creative drawing techniques (movement, imaginative play, and sensory engagement). Design decisions were then based on design fieldwork with children. The end product is a board game that the objective is to facilitate children with education game tools based on provision and participation. The study is carried out to identify the creative values of educative game tools and to know the feasibility of the educative game tools found in children’s education. To achieve the objectives, the approach used in the study was qualitative descriptive. The sample was taken by using purposive sampling. The board game is the result of a dynamic and innovative design for teaching, learning, and evaluation of children’s skills in character design. The main objective of the creation of this board game is to generate greater motivation and interest in kids for learning the character design through 8 creative techniques in classes or everywhere that they can play together. Results show high motivation and participation of the children, both in the development of the game and at the time of being used as an evaluation tool.

Keywords:

Educative tool design, Board game, Drawing, Children.