Digital Mind Games: Experience-Based Reflections on Design and Interface Features Supporting the Development of Reasoning Skills

This paper addresses the area of games based learning; it refers to digital mind games and explores what design and interface features best serve the educational purpose of enhancing reasoning skills, which are actually "key abilities", transversal to any kind of learning. The considerations at the core of the paper draw on a small-scale, long-term pilot research project aimed at fostering primary school students' strategic and reasoning skills by introducing the systematic use of a number of computer-based mainstream mind games in classroom activities. Taking for granted that the effectiveness of any educational intervention is primarily related to the soundness of the underpinning pedagogical design, in the framework of the above mentioned field study it was also demonstrated that the effectiveness of digital mind games to develop reasoning and problem solving skills is closely related to the game format and to some specific design and interface features (indeed, it was shown that different computer implementations of the same game have different degrees of educational effectiveness and impact). This paper presents concrete examples as a means to discuss which characteristics of mind games favor the development and the enhancement of reasoning skills. In particular those features that can support or, conversely, hinder students' cognitive effort are considered, since, during the field experience, the cognitive load required to perform the task appeared to be a crucial point: those mind games that provided a variety of functionalities and stimuli able to sustain and orient cognitive activities, appeared to be better suited to the intended educational purpose, while it also emerged that cognitive overload represents a significant obstacle to learning. While exploring the use of mind games to support the development of reasoning skills, in this paper emphasis is given to those considerations that can have a general validity for their selection and pedagogical use as well as for their design and implementation, in case they are to be used for educational purposes.