Resumen
Children have long learned about space by handling objects on shared tables: wooden blocks, cardboard buildings, scale models, maps and cards. Yet over the past fifteen years, research on games in architectural and urban education has turned decisively toward digital media, from city-building simulations to Minecraft and, more recently, game engines fed with open 3D city models. This theoretical paper re-examines the analog side of this field. It asks what board games and other physical design games contribute to children's learning about architecture and the city, and what role the physical support itself plays in collaboration. The paper first situates game-based learning within the movement for children's participation in urban planning and within built environment education. It then traces a genealogy of physical games for learning the city, from Froebel's kindergarten gifts and community model-building to Sanoff's design games, the Japanese machizukuri design game, cooperative planning board games for children such as Pop-up Pest and Stadsbyggarna, and the play city of Mini-München, and compares them with digital counterparts. Building on Moore's theory of transactional distance, which holds that pedagogical distance can exist even in face-to-face settings, and on research on tangible interaction, the paper proposes a framework of five affordances of the physical support: a shared field of attention, embodied spatial reasoning, visible and negotiable rules, persistent and committing moves, and a low threshold of entry. Each affordance is paired with its risks and a design principle. The argument is that the table matters less as a nostalgic alternative to screens than as a device that binds structure, dialogue and autonomy in a single visible space. The paper closes with an illustrative workshop design, a discussion of limits and an agenda for empirical research.
