Currently submitted to: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Mar 1, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 3, 2026 - Apr 28, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
How Collaborative Gameplay Develops Self-Efficacy in Computational Thinking
ABSTRACT
Background:
STEM fields drive socio-economic development; however, engineering disciplines continue to struggle with low enrollment and high dropout rates despite the career prospects. An important predictor of academic performance and career persistence is self-efficacy, which is the belief in one’s ability to succeed. Enhancing self-efficacy through collaborative playful learning experiences may help mitigate these challenges.
Objective:
This study explores a collaborative game design with the intent to enhance self-efficacy regarding computational thinking skills among young students.
Methods:
Through five gameplay rehearsals, we analysed the conducted recordings and interviews through a qualitative methodology.
Results:
we found evidence on how cooperative gameplay enables verbal persuasion, vicarious learning and mutual problem-solving, which are known to be influential factors in self-efficacy development. From these evidence, we also contribute novel design lessons for the research community to explore collaborative environments in game design, such as 1) shared decision-making mechanics, 2) collaborative problem-solving through coordinated, cooperative and co-constructed tasks, 3) resource-sharing, and 4) a common goal with shared rewards.
Conclusions:
We expected this study is an advance in exploring cooperative gameplay as a way to improve self-efficacy towards a gender-balanced STEM environment.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.