Saffie Hollingsworth '27 has created a board game to help first-year students navigate university.
Saffie Hollingsworth ‘27, a computer science and game design major, has developed a board game to help first-year students navigate university life. Collaborating with the University of Iceland, she refined the game through international playtesting, adapting it for cultural differences and planning out an assessment strategy for the fall. The project promotes student success and models impactful undergraduate research and global academic collaboration.
Hollingsworth is spending the summer working at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL), and continuing the project through an independent study. During the spring 2025 semester, Hollingsworth began a 4999 research credit with Jill McSweeney, assistant director of the CATL and assistant professor of wellness, on a project centered around creating a board game that assists first-year students with their transition into university.
First-year undergraduate students experience social (e.g. making friends), academic (e.g. harder subject material), and/or emotional (e.g. loneliness) challenges transitioning to university, which can impact student mental health and lead to a reduction in student success and retention. The project uses game-based learning, which offers a dynamic, interactive and self-directed way to engage first-year students while equipping them with essential skills for navigating social, academic and emotional transitional challenges.
This project was developed in collaboration with faculty members at the University of Iceland, a large public research university.
“Their perspective of the first-year experience is slightly different from Elon’s, which allows us to test our research in a broader environment,” said Hollingsworth. “For example, the University of Iceland is not a residential university and therefore scenarios regarding living on campus or having a roommate are not applicable. Similarly, a lot of students are not entering their first year right from high school, many having full-time jobs, families, or previous degrees when they come in.”
The game is inspired by games such as “The Game of Life,” where students move around a board representing their first year at university, encountering scenarios depicting common dilemmas or events that they might encounter at real life university.
For example, players may experience an event around completing a roommate agreement, just like students do at Elon; or have to choose between studying or going to a campus event with friends the night before a midterm. By completing dilemmas and events, students are presented with decisions that they will have to make throughout their first year, often around things that they may not have thought about.
These decisions have consequences, sometimes it might be negative and they might increase their stress (a natural response they will have to learn to balance through their first year, and in our game something that students will want to manage through engaging with pathways like taking a yoga class with Elon’s Campus Recreation and Health Promotion), and/or develop a skill (either academic, social, or emotional) allowing them to decide how they might like to personally develop over their first year.
“The game encourages students to reflect on the importance of their first year being much more than just their academic experience,” said Hollingsworth. “Engaging in activities and being accountable for their decisions allows them to grow and complete the goals that they have chosen for themselves, and of course, completing goals allows them to get victory points to win the game. Through the exposure to issues that students might face by playing this game, we hope that they will become more prepared for their transition into university.”
This summer, Hollingswoth has continued the project, spending time refining mechanics and creating a physical version for playtesting. Playtesting is important in game design because it allows the designer to receive important feedback to improve the game. Hollingsworth and her collaborators did an initial playtest with three Elon faculty and staff teaching Elon 1010 in the fall, and from their feedback, they continued to adjust and refine the game in order to have a full prototype to test with our international collaborators from Iceland.
With the help of funding from the Center for Research on Global Engagement (CRGE), Hollingsworth was also able to travel to Iceland to work with her collaborators from the University of Iceland, where they did three rounds of playtesting. First, they playtested with two students, and others from the university then with two groups of four, combining faculty and staff from the university.
“The trip to Iceland was a wonderful experience to improve our research and model international research collaboration, but also to explore Iceland,” said Hollingsworth.
Hollingsworth will continue to edit the game based on feedback and will collect data from having Elon 1010 classes play this game next fall. Similarly, collaborators in Iceland intend to collect data during one of their introductory university courses in the fall.