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The Interplay Between Fairness and Randomness in a Spatial Computer Game

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Abstract

This article describes how children use an expressive microworld to articulate ideas about how to make a game seem fair with the use of randomness. Our aim in this study is to disentangle different flavours of fairness and to find out how children used each flavour to make sense of potentially complex behaviour. In order to achieve this, a spatial computer game was designed to enable children to examine the consequences of their attempts to make the game fair. The study investigates how 23 children, aged between 5.5 and 8 years, engaged in constructing a crucial part of a mechanism for a fair spatial lottery machine (microworld). In particular, the children tried to construct a fair game given a situation in which the key elements happened randomly. The children could select objects, determine their properties, and arrange their spatial layout in the machine. The study is based on task-based interviewing of children who were interacting with the computer game. The study shows that children have various cognitive resources for constructing a random fair environment. The spatial arrangement, the visualisation and the manipulations in the lottery machine allow us gain a view into the children’s thinking of the two central concepts, fairness and randomness. The paper reports on two main strategies by which the children attempted to achieve a balance in the lottery machine. One involves arranging the balls symmetrically and the other randomly. We characterize the nature of the thinking in these two strategies: the first we see as deterministic and the latter as stochastic, exploiting the random collisions of the ball. In this article we trace how the children’s thinking moved between these two perspectives.

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Notes

  1. Pathways was designed by the Playground project team: www.ioe.ac.uk/plaground/. A version of Pathways has been marketed as “The Magic Forest” by Logotron Ltd: http://www.logo.com/magicforest/. (For details of the system see also Goldstein et al. 2001).

  2. Consider an experiment whose outcome is not predictable with certainty. Although the outcome of the experiment will not be known in advance, let us suppose that the set of all possible outcomes is known. This set of all possible outcomes of an experiment is known as the sample space of the experiment and is denoted by S (Ross 2002).

  3. It has always intrigued us how some methods of choosing teams seem to contradict these rules of fairness. Children often use rhymes to select who is “out”. These rhymes are entirely predictable and so seem to apply apparent fairness in a situation which should be subject to unsteerable fairness. We can only assume that this practice has survived because of confusion between the two flavours of fairness.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European University Cyprus, 6 Diogenes Str. Engomi, P.O. Box 22006, 1516, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Efthymia Paparistodemou

  2. Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London, WC1 HOAL, UK

    Richard Noss & Dave Pratt

Authors
  1. Efthymia Paparistodemou
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  2. Richard Noss
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  3. Dave Pratt
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Correspondence to Efthymia Paparistodemou.

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Paparistodemou, E., Noss, R. & Pratt, D. The Interplay Between Fairness and Randomness in a Spatial Computer Game. Int J Comput Math Learning 13, 89–110 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-008-9132-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-008-9132-8

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