This scoping review investigates the role of teachers' collaborative competence for Game-Based Learning (GBL), especially for primary education. Over the last 20 years, GBL has gained interest, above all, because it fosters student motivation. GBL is a complex pedagogical approach that lacks its own epistemology, although it is generally considered within the socio-constructivist paradigm. The complexity of this approach is due to its interdisciplinary nature, which requires insights from both game studies and instructional design. Moreover, GBL teachers utilize a variety of approaches and games, including Commercial off-the-shelf games, Serious Games designed for specific learning outcomes, but also opt for Student Game Design, since the act of creation itself fosters learning. Furthermore, teachers use games that range from the digital to the non-digital repertoire. This study excludes gamification, the application of game elements to non-game contexts, so as to maintain a strict focus on the use of actual games in the classroom.  Despite its potential, numerous barriers persist for GBL implementation, including difficulties in aligning games with learning goals, a lack of technological openness, and the need for teachers to develop a lusory attitude. Consequently, Professional Development (PD) is essential to help teachers adapt to the unique roles required by GBL. 

Grounded in Lave & Wenger’s Situated Learning Theory (1991), this study posits that teacher learning is a social practice embedded in specific educational contexts and communities. This study consequently looks into the current meaning of teacher communities, which are shaped by the professional needs and social dynamics of educators. These communities vary significantly, as they can be live or online and their nature changes based on their history, the frequency of their meetings, and the inclusion of non-teacher members, such as game experts and designers. Teacher collaboration and networking is considered only as a peripheral element in some GBL frameworks like Game Network Analysis (Foster et al., 2019) that focus on the technological and pedagogical knowledge. In contrast, the Nousiainen et al. (2018) model identifies Collaborative Competence as a fundamental pillar alongside pedagogical, technical, and creative skills and attitudes. Collaborative competence is framed as fundamental because it is key to overcome implementation barriers, thanks to the sharing of practical solutions among teachers. However, the collaborative competence defined within this framework treats online and offline training as if they fostered PD similarly, although sharing practices differ significantly in the two settings. By focusing on co-development and community networking, this review explores how teachers’ sharing of ideas, materials and difficulties helps them overcome doubts and fosters a deeper understanding and possible adoption of GBL pedagogy. Moreover, it looks into the specificities of on-site and off-site GBL teacher training.

Therefore, this review addresses three primary research questions: what facilitates GBL PD teacher collaborativeness, what effects collaborative GBL PD foster, and to what extent the Nousiainen model can be generalized.

The methodology for this scoping review follows the SPiDER model (Cooke et. al., 2012): Sample, Phenomenon of Interest, Design, Evaluation, Research type, which is particularly effective for synthesizing findings from qualitative and mixed-methods empirical works. The research was conducted over a 8 month period in 2025 under the supervision of two experts in pedagogy and game studies. The Sample targets pre-service and in-service teachers working with 3-14 aged students, ensuring the results are applicable to kindergarten, primary, and middle school contexts. The Phenomenon of Interest is specifically defined as teachers’ collaborative competence within the GBL framework. The Design includes a broad range of academic works, including journals, conference papers, such as ECGBL proceedings, and theses, to have a more systematic and comprehensive scope. Likewise, both qualitative and quantitative Research types were accepted. The review process follows a structured six-step approach: 1. Query Writing: Tailored search strings were developed in both English and Italian to capture terms related to GBL, teacher communities, and professional development. 2. Database Selection: Searches were conducted in Education Research Complete (Ebsco), Education Database (ProQuest), and Google Scholar, initially yielding 4,360 records. Other databases, such as Scopus and Web of Science, were initially considered, but then left out, because they provided fewer pertinent results in comparison. 3. Paper Selection: A multi-stage filtering process, following the Prisma model (Page et al., 2021), based on title, abstract, and full-text relevance along with language criteria (English/Italian) and a publication range from 2015 to 30/04/2025, reduced the corpus to 48 final works. 4. Data Extraction: Relevant excerpts were categorized according to Nousiainen’s collaborative areas: "Co-development and sharing" and "Networking and Community" and, then, within those areas, as “Facilitating Factors” or “Fostered effects”. 5. Content Analysis: Due to a lack of pre-existing works on the facilitating factors and fostered effects regarding GBL training, a bottom-up approach (Cresswell, 2012) was necessary to code the excerpts. During this phase, it became evident that the collaborative competence area needed to be restructured into three distinct categories: Co-development, Live Communities and Online Communities. 6. Discussion of Results: Factors and effects were counted to determine their frequency and generalizability within the 3 areas and across the 48 studies.

The study’s findings show that a distinction between live and online communities is needed for understanding teacher professional development, when it pertains to GBL. Therefore, Nousiainen and colleagues’ model (2018) requires some specific refinement since Live Communities and Online Communities exhibit different dynamics and PD effects. Through the review process the 48 works were initially classified within the 3 areas: Co-development is the most recurrent area with 31 works, Networking pertains 7 works for Live Communities and 10 works for Online Communities. Looking into the details of the analysis, peer support through group discussions is the most universal facilitating factor across all areas of collaboration (36 out of 48 works). Regarding the effects of collaboration, the results vary by area. Co-development primarily improves practical game design and instructional skills (19 out of 31 works). Online communities are highly effective for resource sharing (8 out of 10 works). Live Communities, instead, appear to be the most associated with fostering actual GBL adoption and implementation (5 out of 7 works). This is connected with the fact that live communal training promotes a deeper understanding of GBL (6 out of 7 works) and increases teacher self-efficacy (5 out of 7 works). Besides these insights, the review also highlights one main issue: the definition of a "community" in these works often relies on organizational labels rather than on specific relational dynamics between educators. Consequently, future works should point out which community features are recognized within the sample they are working with. Ultimately, future research should focus on the specific features of Teacher Communities that most effectively promote long-term GBL adoption. By understanding these dynamics, teacher training programs can be better designed to help teachers implement a sustainable, pedagogical shift toward game-integrated learning.

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