The shaping of an idea as temporal, multimodal, and collaborative activity: exploring how students develop a board game in L1

Brainstorming activities are quite common in L1 education. However, limited attention has been paid to the concrete unfolding of students’ idea development as a temporal, multimodal, and collaborative process. In this article, we explore how a group of four upper primary students in Year 5 (age 11–12) design a board game in a teaching unit on young people’s communication and toxic language use on social media. The unit was part of an intervention carried out in a study on game-based learning in the school subject Danish L1. Our detailed analysis shows how the students’ development process involved an interplay of different timescales at the micro, meso, and macro level, and a use of different semiotic resources such as spoken and written language as well as drawn sketches for a game board. The layers of meaning expressed through the students’ dialogic talk resulted in a metaphorical chain of reasoning, where the students’ initial loose idea was gradually transformed into a final game concept. This reasoning across modalities was enforced through the choice of bringing in paper and pen for drawing. The study concludes by discussing how we can understand idea generation as a non-linear multimodal process in the L1 classroom, which may have implications for other productive tasks.