Questions as prototypes: Facilitating children's discovery and elaboration during game design.

Prototyping is critical for refining designs, but to advance to this stage requires openness to changing ideas. We examine two cases of 14-year old children constructing and playtesting physical prototypes of digital games: one group characterized as flexible in their ideas, and the other characterized as fixated. Field notes, audio recordings, and design artifacts show how one team's flexibility allowed them to discover material constraints and affordances through prototyping; while the other's fixation influenced his prototyping strategy and limited his learning from it. We explore how questions from facilitators helped both teams to elaborate and generate ideas. This study has implications for supporting children in game design.