A new era of boardgames in mathematics education: a case study in Portugal

Games, in particular board games, have the potential to cause high states of satisfaction, an essential characteristic for lasting learning. In this work, it is carried out a study with 15 students of the 6th grade of Basic Education, where the tabletop game Absolute Blast! is used to address concepts related to algebraic operations on the set of integers. From the implementation of the game in the classroom context, a question arises 'in what way Absolute Blast! helps students to learn addition with integer numbers?'. To answer this question, a pretest was applied, two fifty-minute sessions were performed with the game Absolute Blast! and, at the end, a post-test was also applied. A quantitative analysis of the results was carried with the Wilcoxon test for non-parametric paired data. As a main result, it was concluded that Absolute Blast! had a positive impact regarding addition with integer numbers.