Abstract:

Game-based learning has long been recognized as a powerful approach in mathematics education, as research and classroom experience consistently show its potential to support both the emotional and cognitive dimensions of learning. The use of games in mathematics encourages active participation, lowers students’ fear of failure, and enhances motivation. At the same time, it promotes the consolidation of procedures, long-term memorization, and deeper conceptual understanding.

Within this broader framework, cooperative games represent a particularly promising category. Unlike competitive games, they are characterized by a shared objective: players collaborate to reach a common goal and experience success or failure collectively. Communication, coordination, and strategic planning become essential elements of gameplay. When integrated into classroom practice, cooperative games can foster inclusive participation, reduce exclusion and aggressiveness, and create a learning environment in which students feel safer to express ideas, test hypotheses, and reflect on errors.

Despite these well-documented benefits, the systematic use of games in mathematics education, especially at the secondary level, remains limited. Several obstacles hinder their widespread adoption, including insufficient teacher training in game-based methodologies and the limited availability of games explicitly aligned with curricular mathematical content. As a result, games are often perceived as peripheral activities rather than as fully integrated didactical tools.

To address these challenges, our work focuses on the design of curriculum-oriented cooperative games, inspired by common student errors and conceived for whole-class use. These games are embedded within teacher professional development courses, allowing educators to experience cooperative learning dynamics firsthand and to reflect on their didactical potential.

This contribution presents two examples of cooperative board games characterized by a high degree of design flexibility, enabling adaptation to different mathematical topics, levels of complexity, and even to other subject areas or cross-curricular themes.

The first game, Clue by Clue, is a cooperative deduction game in which the progressive selection and interpretation of clues guide the group towards the identification of a target card. The second game, Watch Out for the Sardine, is structured around a shared objective: players collaboratively complete sets of card families according to predefined rules, while drawing from a common deck that includes a limited number of sardine cards acting as a collective constraint.

Through the analysis of game rules and selected gameplay scenarios, the paper illustrates how both games foster whole-class discussion and the argumentation of decisions, activating logical reasoning, mathematical language, and metacognitive processes. The cooperative setting encourages students to make their thinking explicit, compare strategies, and collectively reflect on errors and alternative hypotheses.

The games have already been proposed in numerous teacher training courses in Italy and Portugal. In addition to receiving very positive feedback, they have been adapted by participating teachers and brought into classrooms ranging from primary to secondary education, demonstrating their versatility and transferability across different educational contexts.

Keywords:

Cooperative games, Mathematics education, Game-based learning.