Tango Cards: A Card-Based Design Tool for Informing the Design of Tangible Learning Games

For over thirty years researchers have suggested that both tangible user interfaces and digital games have potential to support learning. Each domain now has a well-developed body of literature about how to design them to enable learning benefits. What is needed is a way to bring this knowledge, which is often lengthy, dense, and jargon laden to design practice. To address this need, I designed and evaluated Tango Cards—a card-based design tool. I found that Tango Cards enabled a variety of uses that made design knowledge about tangible learning games accessible to designers. I identified and discussed how specific card features supported or limited card use by designers. Drawing on the findings of Tango Cards and previous cards, I set forth design considerations that can support others to create design tools (card-based or alike) that bring scholarly design knowledge to designers.