From critical game analysis to pedagogical redesign: A qualitative multiple-case study in undergraduate plant science education
This qualitative multiple-case study demonstrates that having undergraduate biology students critically analyze existing plant science games and subsequently redesign them serves as an effective pedagogical task for making the complex trade-offs between disciplinary accuracy, gameplay mechanics, and educational feasibility visible, even though the resulting artifacts do not directly measure individual learning gains.
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In the world of science education, games have long been seen as a way to make learning stick. Teachers and researchers know that when students play a game, they are not just having fun; they are organizing information around goals, rules, and decisions. For years, the focus has been on how well students learn by playing games that experts have already built. But a different question has begun to emerge: what happens when students are asked to build the game themselves? This shift moves the student from a passive player to an active designer. In this role, they must take complex scientific ideas and turn them into rules that make sense. It is a process that forces them to think deeply about how knowledge works, not just what it is. This is particularly true for plant science, a field where the relationships between water, hormones, soil, and light can be translated into the strategic choices of a game.
A recent study from a public university in Brazil explored this idea in a course on plant propagation. The researchers wanted to see if asking students to first critique an existing educational game, and then redesign it, would help them understand the connection between science and gameplay. They did not simply ask the students to create a new game from scratch. Instead, they gave them a specific task: take an existing game or teaching tool about plants, tear it apart with a critical eye, and then use those insights to build something new. The study followed three groups of undergraduate biology students as they moved from analysis to creation. The goal was not to measure how much the students learned about plants, but to watch how they thought about the design of learning itself.
The students began by examining three different resources. One group looked at a board game called Enraizando, where players grow plants by managing resources like water and nutrients. Another group studied a card game called Eu Sei Fisiologia Vegetal, which used clues to help players identify plant hormones. The third group analyzed a simple true-or-false activity about cutting and grafting plants. Using a structured guide with twelve specific questions, the students had to decide what worked and what did not. They asked themselves: Does the game rely on luck or on knowing the science? Is the thinking too easy or too hard? Does everyone get a chance to participate, or does the fastest person win? They also looked at whether the original game had been tested to see if it actually helped people learn.
What the students found was that a game is not just a container for facts. It is a system where the rules determine how knowledge is used. In the board game, the students saw that while science mattered, random cards could sometimes override a player's knowledge. In the card game, they noticed that speed was a major factor, which meant that a player might guess correctly just because they were fast, not because they understood the biology. In the true-or-false activity, they saw that the format encouraged quick answers rather than deep thinking. These were not just complaints; they were the raw materials for the next step.
When the students moved to the redesign phase, they did not simply fix every problem they had found. Instead, they made choices based on what they thought was most important for learning. One group took the board game and changed it into a digital card game. They kept the idea that environmental conditions should matter, but they shifted the medium entirely. Another group took the card game and turned it into a physical electronic device with buttons and lights. They kept the fast-paced, competitive nature of the original but made the interaction more intense and tangible. They decided that speed was a feature they wanted to keep, even though they had criticized it in the original analysis.
The third group took the most dramatic approach. They looked at the simple true-or-false activity and decided that speed was the enemy of learning. In their new game, called PropagAÇÃO, they removed the race to answer first. Instead, they introduced a system where groups took turns. They replaced simple statements with real-world problems that required the players to explain their answers. If a player got the answer right but could not explain why, they did not get full points. They also added different levels of difficulty, so the game could challenge players who knew more. This group decided that the most important part of the game was not the speed of the response, but the quality of the reasoning.
The study showed that there is no single "correct" way to redesign a game. The students made different choices because they valued different things. One group wanted to keep the excitement of a race, while another wanted to slow things down to allow for better thinking. Both decisions were valid responses to the problems they had identified. The research suggests that the act of critiquing a game before building a new one helps students see the trade-offs involved in teaching. They learned that making a game faster might make it more exciting but less thoughtful. They learned that adding more rules might make it more accurate but harder to play.
This process of analysis and redesign turned the students into thoughtful designers. They stopped treating the game as a finished product and started seeing it as a set of choices. They realized that every rule they wrote was a statement about how they believed people learn. By making these choices visible, the study showed that game design is a powerful way to teach science. It forces students to think about not just the content, but how that content is delivered. The students did not just learn about plant propagation; they learned how to build a system where that knowledge could be used, tested, and understood. The study concludes that asking students to analyze and then redesign games is a valuable step in science education, one that helps them understand the deep connection between what we know and how we play.
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