Development of computational thinking and artificial intelligence skills through a board game for primary students in Border Patrol Police Schools

This study aimed to develop computational thinking and artificial intelligence (AI) skills and to enhance the learning achievement of primary school students in border patrol police schools through the implementation of a specially designed educational board game. The research adopted a one-group pretest‒posttest preexperimental design to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. The participants consisted of 45 primary school students selected through cluster sampling, including 15 students from the Chaloem Rat Bamrung Border Patrol Police School and 30 students from the Ban Huai Pao Border Patrol Police School. The research instruments included a board game quality assessment form, a computational thinking and artificial intelligence skills assessment, an interview form, and an achievement test. The theoretical foundation for board game development was derived from four key domains: learning psychology, computational thinking and AI foundations, media and technology theory, and contextual learning principles relevant to rural educational settings. The board game was designed to encourage problem decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, algorithm design, and comprehension of basic AI concepts such as perception, data representation, and machine learning. The findings revealed that students demonstrated notable improvement in both computational thinking and AI-related problem-solving skills after participating in the board game activities. Moreover, statistical analysis indicated a significant increase in students’ learning achievement at the 0.05 level, with the mean test score rising from 5.60 in the pretest to 14.13 in the posttest out of a total score of 20. These results suggest that integrating game-based learning strategies can effectively foster computational thinking and AI understanding among young learners in remote educational contexts, thereby promoting 21st-century skills development in primary education.