Pixels & Meelples

Our board games

Moon

Moon is an educational board game aimed to develop several Computational Thinking-related skills, such as information representation and binary coding, binary arithmetic, binary logic, and basic system's architecture. UDEUSTO developed a printed version of the game in a previous Erasmus+ Project (2018-1-ES01-KA201-050415), but many teachers and students asked for a complementary app that would allow playing MOON is a wider set of scenarios (during playtime, commuting, at home, etc.) and use their mobile devices for educational purposes.

You can play an online version of Moon here:

The Moon app allows users to adapt the difficulty level of the game in an easy way. Three levels of increasing difficulty are shown in the main menu (easy, medium, hard) and it's be possible to configure all aspects of the game (number of errors, resets, bugs, energy, operations, etc.) in a custom difficulty mode.

Since TRUEBA, BvS, HBG, and PGPP participated in the testing and piloting, and subsequently use of the app in their technology, mathematics and computer activities, hundreds of primary and secondary school students used the game to develop digital skills in a playful way. In addition, the app is freely released enabling schools, organizations and families across Europe to play the game.

Current status: Available

Block Miners

In the last decade, systems based on blockchains have become more and more popular, mainly thanks to cryptocurrencies such as BitCoin or Ethereum. However, most people do not know what a blockchain is and how it works. For this reason, we will design and develop an app-enhanced board game that explains in a practical and fun way key concepts to understand blockchains such as metadata, blocks, hash functions, public ledgers, integrity assurance mechanisms and consensus algorithms.

Thanks to this board game, students and teachers in the last years of primary education and first years of secondary education are able to understand how crypto-currencies work as well as other blockchain-based systems such as digital assets management systems, educational or medical ledgers, or smart contracts. The app associated with the board game allows players to forget about the tedious task of keeping track of the points of each participant without harming the game experience or the educational component of the game.

Although there are several cryptocurrency-related board games on the market, none of them focus on explaining how a blockchain works but the speculation dynamics that arise with virtual currencies. The most innovative aspect of this game is that it explains how a blockchain works in a simple enough way so that a student in the last years of primary education can understand it but without losing rigor and truthfulness at the same time.

The impact of this playful and educational material is expected to be very noticeable in primary and secondary schools' students and teachers. Having a growing number of initiatives interested in explaining in easily understandable ways the fundamentals of the blockchain, all the partners of this project (UDEUSTO, AGRPRIORITY, TRUEBA, BvS, HBG and PGPP) organized events to demonstrate the pedagogical potential of this educational material. We hope that hundreds of primary and secondary school students from different countries (Spain, Germany, Portugal, Greece and others) will benefit from the practical workshops carried out with this game.

Current status: Available

Red Team

Hackers, crackers, viruses, computer worms, botnets, trojans, firewalls, exploits and other technical terms related to computer security usually scare us in the mass media headlines. Despite many of them are somehow familiar, we may not really understand how they work and what consequences they can have for our digital identity. Despite the many books and multimedia available for learning about computer security, much of this educational material is not suitable for primary and secondary school students and teachers.

Although there are several board games related to computer security, many of them employ generic game mechanics that could be used in other contexts and do not take advantage of the replayability and immersion provided by an app-enhaced board game. For that reason, we will design and develop an immersive game about ethical hacking and computer security that will present a large number of different scenarios with challenges of increasing complexity to show how they work and what are the implications of suffering many of the computer attacks that are in the news.