Game playing and fluctuations in emotional climate

Abstract

The inclusion of games in mathematics programmes is widely believed to foster the enjoyment of mathematics. The focus of this paper is on fluctuations in emotional climate during the playing of whole-class mathematics games. A multimethod approach drawing on the sociology of emotions was employed to explore changes in the classroom emotional climate that were associated with game playing. The event-oriented inquiry was conducted with two teachers and a class of 10- to 13-year-olds in a New Zealand classroom during mathematics sessions. Over a series of eight mathematics lessons, there were three noticeable fluctuations in emotional climate, all of which occurred during whole-class games. Our analysis of these three events identified a successful interaction with dramatic emotional energy associated with a positive emotional climate, a successful interaction with undramatic emotional energy associated with positive emotional climate, and an unsuccessful interaction associated with negative emotional climate with interactional repair. The third event also illustrated how the incomplete nature of a game’s rules can provide an opportunity for a negative emotional climate to be associated with game playing. The taken-for-granted wisdom that whole-class mathematics games can enhance emotional aspects of a classroom learning environment is supported by some of our evidence.

Formal rules and rules as reasoning-in-action: playing games with reality in science education

“…A further innovation by Bonne and Higgins (2022) is their social and phenomenological framing of the study, and their regard for game rules as enacted phenomena that are performed and experienced through, and as, the game itself (Liberman 2013). In science education, this is a novel application of an ethnomethodological orientation (Garfinkel 1967) where enacted rules may be evident through the utterances, prosody, silences, facial actions, and gestures of people who are playing out the game by interacting with each other.…”

“…The formal rules of a game are an important feature of game design and are typically what people first reach for when learning a new game, looking for how the game should start, where it should progress to, and how it is won or lost. For example, one of the games described by Bonne and Higgins (2022) required class members to "follow the metaphor, round-the-world" by sitting in a large circle around the classroom. The teacher started the game by nominating two students to compete against each other by answering a question she posed.…”

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Bonne and Higgins (2022) explore game playing and fluctuations in emotional climate at a classroom level of analysis using a social and phenomenological orientation. My aim in this forum paper is to extend upon their work by exploring the nature of both formal game rules and practical game rules as reasoning-in-action where science reasoning may be embedded.

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“…The investigation of these games was notable because of their class-wide application, which was different to many other previous studies that describe game play at the individual or small group level of interaction. In addition to being a non-digital example of gamified learning Bonne and Higgins (2022) investigated game playing and fluctuations in emotional climate (EC). EC is a collective experience of emotive arousal evident at the classroom level through social interaction and is measurable via self-reported feelings of intensity and positive or negative valence (Bellocchi, Ritchie, Tobin, Sandhu and Sandhu 2013).…”

“…EC is a collective experience of emotive arousal evident at the classroom level through social interaction and is measurable via self-reported feelings of intensity and positive or negative valence (Bellocchi, Ritchie, Tobin, Sandhu and Sandhu 2013). Bonne and Higgins (2022) contribute to this field by applying both the study of social interaction and self-report methods to understand fluctuations in EC across different games with different class configurations and with different teachers leading the games. While there are numerous studies investigating abstract constructs in gamified learning such as motivation and student engagement, there are fewer studies focusing on social interaction and in-the-moment emotive experiences such as EC from sociocultural perspectives (cf.…”