Designing Our Own Board Games in the Playful Space: Improving High School Student’s Citizenship Competencies and Creativity through Game-Based Learning

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

It would be appropriate at the outset to describe how "civic competencies and creativity" fit into the overall framework of "core competencies", they are somewhat taken out of the context of the competence framework for 21st Century, where reference is made to a source from 2009. It has not been since then even for Taiwanese environment updated?

The research model and the findings are innovative and original, however, exact generalization of the findings would require repeating the experiment and a significantly larger research sample. However, as a case study, an example of good practice and an inspiring subject, the research conducted is very successful.

It would be good to more precisely specify the evidence that the three-phase game model will indeed increase the level of civic competencies, it is obvious for creativity, but civic competencies are only demonstrated in a longer perspective when acting and making decisions in social interactions. Can it really be identified immediately after the educational event?

I recommend that the recapitulation of the findings in the Conclusion be elaborated argumentatively and specified in more detail, in the presented version it is too brief and general.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1,

Many thanks for all the enlightening comments and suggestions. We provide a point-by-point response to your comments in the attached document. Please see the attachment. 

Best regards,

Chih-Ching

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

I would like to thank you for the opportunity to review your paper, I strongly support its publication. Here are some minor corrections that I propose to implement:

1.      All references should be in English as this is the language of the journal expected by readers (references 1-6 are not in English). Please correct it.

2.      The justification of 2 competences, civic competences and creativity, is not clear. Authors write (p.1, Introduction): „To function well in the rapidly changing society and create a harmonious environment, students should foster their civic competencies and creativity, the two fundamental abilities”, however, there are no references to support this statement, and not further justification. Please add some comments to reinforce your choice.

3.      Some editorial corrections are needed regarding references in the text. The authors used both MDPI style, that is, they put references as numbers in parentheses, and APA style, in which they gave the name(s) of the author(s) and the year of publication. As an example, let me quote a few sentences from the first paragraph: “However, traditional knowledge-focused, narrative, and teacher-centred teaching have always been regarded as the most widely used approach in civic education (Tsai et al., 2020). It is believed that the traditional approach may be tedious and challenging to trigger students' intrinsic motivation to acquire civic consciousness and foster civic attitudes and values [4, 5].”

4.      Information is missing when the experiment was conducted, please complete this.

5.      Information on the sample size is confusing. Authors write (p. 8): „There were two classes of 11-grade students, with 40 in the experimental class and 40 in the control class. In total, 22 boys and 18 girls aged 16 to 18 participated in the study.” Two groups of 40 students each, gives 80 students, while 22 boys and 18 girls gives 40 students participating in the research.

6.      I would like to read how much time the students spent on all board game design activities, Table 1 indicates that it was a 12-week course, but I would like to know how many hours per week.

7.      I really like the idea of designing board games by students, so I would like to know the Authors' opinion on the limitations of this method regarding different levels of education, different countries or cultures. In other words, to what extent this method can be implemented worldwide.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2,

Many thanks for all the enlightening comments and suggestions. We provide a point-by-point response to your comments in the attached document. Please see the attachment. 

Best regards,

Chih-Ching

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf