Bringing Educational Games to the Afterschool: Collaborative Design-Based Research Approach to “Think like a 10 Year Old”

In our ever-ending quest to promote science education, can we take educational games to the afterschool? Following the modus-operandi of the Israeli Scouts, two motivated teens (whom we call Cyberscouts) volunteered to join a collaborative design-based research (which we entitle as ‘co-DBR’). Our shared objective is to design an effective model to bring educational games to the afterschool. This article reports the findings of the first iteration of the Cyberscouts model, in which the Cyberscout leaders designed and implemented the process of bringing the Quest-Atlantis educational game to an afterschool setting. We find that the teens’ ability to view the process “like a 10 year old” had a strong impact on the refinement of the model. We conclude that the novel co-DBR approach has the potential to serve as both a productive pedagogical approach and as an added value to DBR methodology.