A Board Game Design Study for Children's Online Consumption Safety Education

Abstract
With the trend of younger children accessing the Internet and the widespread use of mobile payment, online consumption risks have become increasingly prominent. Existing online safety education for children is largely based on knowledge transmission, making it difficult to effectively improve children's risk identification and response abilities in real online consumption contexts. Taking children aged 7-12 as the research object, this paper integrates Piaget's theory of cognitive development, Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives, situated cognition theory, and board game design theory. By adopting case analysis and educational objective transformation, this study extracts six core knowledge modules from cases of children's online consumption in mainland China: consumption identification, money mapping, account and payment boundaries, inducement recognition, consequence prediction and delayed decision-making, and help-seeking and remediation. These modules are further transformed into hierarchical educational objectives. On this basis, three high-frequency scenarios—game recharge, live-streaming tipping, and online shopping—are constructed, and a task mechanism of “event triggering-choice judgment-outcome feedback-review” is formed. A gamified board game design scheme for children's online consumption safety education is then proposed. The study argues that board games can reduce the difficulty of children's understanding of online consumption risks through concretized, situated, and interactive approaches, and can promote risk identification, prudent judgment, and active help-seeking awareness in simulated decision-making, thereby providing an implementable design scheme for children's online consumption safety education.

Keywords
children's online consumption safety; gamified design; board game; educational objective transformation

Cite this paper
Junyuan Tan, A Board Game Design Study for Children's Online Consumption Safety Education , SCIREA Journal of Education. Volume 11, Issue 3, June 2026 | PP. 61-72. 10.54647/education880668

References

[ 1 ]	Editorial Department of This Journal. (2018). Investigation of Internet use and cybersecurity among Chinese adolescents. China Information Security, (06), 56-59.
[ 2 ]	Cheng, X., & Fan, J. (2019). Legal analysis of minors' recharge and tipping behavior in online live streaming. Economic and Trade Law Review, (03), 1-15.
[ 3 ]	Dai, X., Ji, Y., & Cai, Y. (2022). Research on digital dissemination of Guangcai firing techniques based on situated cognition. Packaging Engineering, 43(S1), 242-249.
[ 4 ]	He, G. (2012). On the advantageous application of board games from the perspective of game purposes. Journal of Guangdong Youth Vocational College, 26(03), 90-93.
[ 5 ]	Liang, Z. (2022). Research on the design of a board game for improving primary school students' ability to prevent online fraud [Master's thesis, Guangdong University of Technology].
[ 6 ]	Liu, Z. (2024). Definition, characteristics, influencing factors, and prevention measures of adolescent Internet addiction. Juvenile Delinquency Prevention Research, 6, 51-59.
[ 7 ]	Sang, Z. (2024). Legal issues of minors' tipping in online live streaming. E-Commerce Letters, 13, 7170.
[ 8 ]	Sang, Z. (2025). Legal dilemmas and solutions for the protection of minors' online consumption. E-Commerce Letters, 14, 1314.
[ 9 ]	Sun, Q. (2012). Analysis of Piaget's theory of cognitive development stages and its educational implications. Journal of Nanchang College, 27(01), 64-66.
[ 10 ]	Wu, S., Zhu, J., & Wang, Z. (2018). A brief analysis of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives. Education Modernization, 5(46), 22-23.
[ 11 ]	Xiao, H., Li, Q., Shao, W., & Yan, P. (2014). Research on the implications of Bloom's educational theory for school physical education in China. Journal of Jilin Institute of Physical Education, 30(02), 87-89.
[ 12 ]	Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.