Applying component-based strategy to design an educational board game for children to learn Chinese characters

This paper proposes an educational board game, “Chinese-character-monsters” (CCM), to facilitate primary students in Chinese character learning. Each monster game card represents a specific component of Chinese characters, which can be further combined as various Chinese characters. In the board game, students are offered a number of opportunities to apply this component-based strategy, they thus can be more aware of how Chinese characters consist of different components. A preliminary evaluation was also conducted to investigate its impacts, including satisfaction, self-efficacy, and flow experience. The results showed that the CCM educational board game had a positive effect on students. These findings will guide our design to further modify and tune the CCM board game.