Exploring Collaborative Argumentation Through a Local-Issue-Based Board Game

This qualitative case study explores how a locally contextualized board game can foster collaborative argumentation among high school students. We developed Z-City Myth, a role-playing argumentation game informed by dialogic argumentation and situated cognition theories, where players collaborate to interpret data, build hypotheses, and present conclusions on an investigation. Two 3-student groups (N = 6) participated in this research, including gameplay observation and post-game interviews. Thematic analysis characterized how students in both groups used data as evidence, coordinated perspectives, and applied reasoning strategies. Results suggest the game affords collaborative argumentation, demonstrating its potential in learning argumentation, such as providing authentic argumentation context and assessment. As two student groups also demonstrated issues and challenges in collaboration and argumentation, further scaffolding on both are required in the future.