The Interplay Between Fairness and Randomness in a Spatial Computer Game

Abstract

This article describes how children use an expressive microworld to articulate ideas about how to make a game seem fair with the use of randomness. Our aim in this study is to disentangle different flavours of fairness and to find out how children used each flavour to make sense of potentially complex behaviour. In order to achieve this, a spatial computer game was designed to enable children to examine the consequences of their attempts to make the game fair. The study investigates how 23 children, aged between 5.5 and 8 years, engaged in constructing a crucial part of a mechanism for a fair spatial lottery machine (microworld). In particular, the children tried to construct a fair game given a situation in which the key elements happened randomly. The children could select objects, determine their properties, and arrange their spatial layout in the machine. The study is based on task-based interviewing of children who were interacting with the computer game. The study shows that children have various cognitive resources for constructing a random fair environment. The spatial arrangement, the visualisation and the manipulations in the lottery machine allow us gain a view into the children’s thinking of the two central concepts, fairness and randomness. The paper reports on two main strategies by which the children attempted to achieve a balance in the lottery machine. One involves arranging the balls symmetrically and the other randomly. We characterize the nature of the thinking in these two strategies: the first we see as deterministic and the latter as stochastic, exploiting the random collisions of the ball. In this article we trace how the children’s thinking moved between these two perspectives.