Digital technologies increasingly permeate our daily activities, education, and work. From a postdigital perspective, people are not simply users of digital tools; rather, digital systems play active roles in the constitutive entanglement of ‘physical and digital technologies, spaces, activities, and time’ (Jandrić et al., 2018, p. 896). Developing the skills to understand, act on, and engage through digital data and data infrastructures, referred to as data literacies, is vital for all citizens' participation and empowerment (Castañeda, Haba-Ortuño, et al., 2024). This paper explores the relevance of analogue games for digital learning, drawing on a case study of the use of learning games for data literacy in a continuing education workshop.

Games have long acted as important social spaces for individuals across cultures, during both childhood and adulthood, for purposes of entertainment and education (Breien, 2024). Research has shown the relevance of analogue games in fostering learning in such areas as data literacy (Lameras, et al., 2024) and creative thinking (Ness et al., 2024), emphasising social inclusion, immersion, and intrinsic motivation in learning processes (Sousa et al., 2023).

This contribution presents a case study from a series of continuing education workshops that incorporated two analogue data literacy learning games. The study had a dual purpose: to pilot revised versions of the two games and to gain insight into the students’ learning experiences when using these games in face-to-face workshops.

The two games were originally designed and developed as part of the European Erasmus+ project Data Literacy for Citizenship (DALI), which aimed to support data literacy for adults intended for a variety of different formal and informal learning contexts (DALI, 2023). The DALI project aimed to facilitate ‘networked game-based learning experiences’ based on an approach emphasising learner agency while integrating principles of playful learning and networked learning (Castañeda, Arnab, et al., 2024). 

In this present study, two of the games were further developed and redesigned, including terminology updates, to align with the curriculum of a university level online continuing education course on data literacy (SLATE, 2024; UIB, 2024). The games were designed (and combined) to raise awareness and knowledge about data (Castañeda, Arnab, et al., 2024). The first game, Game of Phones (renamed to DataDelta), requires players to conduct internet searches and create stories. This is a round-based card game aiming to promote digital participation, asking players to find specific items online in the form of images, videos, websites, and music tracks (DALI, 2023). The second game, Data Iceberg, is a memory game where the players look for pairs of cards before categorising them on player boards according to data type (SLATE, 2024).

The study is guided by the following research questions:

1. What do continuing education students report about their learning through playing the games?
2. How do the students describe the relational processes involved?

To investigate these questions, a paper-based questionnaire was distributed after the students had finished playing the two analogue learning games during the data literacy workshop.

The study employed a case study research design (Simons, 2009), which facilitated the investigation of this specific case by producing insight into students’ experiences and evaluation of the two learning games. The case is situated in the context of an online continuing education course for data literacy at the University of Bergen titled ‘Fantastic Data’ (UIB, 2024), where all students enrolled were invited to take part in a non-mandatory, face-to-face workshop. Six workshops were conducted, providing the students with the opportunity to engage in in-person discussions with their peers on data concepts learned during the online course. The workshops took place during the spring semester of 2024, with each workshop incorporating the same two games, accompanied by short pre-play introductions and post-play debriefing activities. The students were invited to fill in paper-based questionnaires that included both quantitative and qualitative (open-ended) questions (Braun et al., 2021). The participants were informed that participation was voluntary, and their answers would be kept anonymous. A total of 62 (out of 78) students completed the questionnaire, reporting on their learning experiences, and the respondents were from diverse professional backgrounds (45 % public sector, 29% private sector, 21% teachers, 5% other). The open-ended answers were analysed using inductive coding and the construction of themes (Braun et al., 2021).

This study set out to explore how students in a continuing education course perceived their learning through playing the analogue games for data literacy (RQ1) and how they described the relational processes involved in game-based learning (RQ2). Preliminary findings show that students reported that both games promoted social connection and collaboration skills, although each game provided a different kind of learning experience. The students described the first game, Game of Phones (DataDelta), as promoting collaboration and creative problem-solving skills, while contributing less to critical thinking skills and their comprehension of data. They reported that the second game, Data Iceberg, enhanced their collaboration and critical thinking abilities, as well as their knowledge of data, but it did not foster creativity and problem-solving skills. When the students detailed the relational processes involved, they consistently reported that the games fostered social connections and that these were beneficial for their learning process. In the open questions, the students frequently refer to being socially active and having to listen carefully to others while playing the learning games. Moreover, this engaging and inclusive quality appears to be a key affordance of the games’ analogue, game-based learning approach to data literacy. Preliminary analysis suggests that the analogue game-based approach can be valuable for promoting data literacy due to its potential for social connection, dialogue, active learning, and listening. Acknowledgements The Trond Mohn Research Foundation supported this study through the EduTrust AI project (TMS2023TMT03). The DALI project received funding from the European Commission through Erasmus+ (2020-1-N001-KA204-076492).

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