COTS BOARD GAMES AND AI AS EMOTIONAL AND COGNITIVE ECOSYSTEMS FOR DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP: A TEACHER’S PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

This paper presents an innovative Teacher Professional Development (TPD) program that integrates Commercial Off-The- Shelf (COTS) board games and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) to cultivate complexity awareness, emotional intelli‐ gence, and democratic agency in secondary STEM education. In a global context marked by democratic backsliding, widening inequalities, and accelerated digital transformation, citizenship education increasingly requires the capacity to interpret technoscientific systems, negotiate uncertainty, and regulate emotions in situations characterized by risk, ambiguity, and competing values. We argue that learning for democracy cannot be reduced to content transmission or abstract civic principles: it must be enacted through participatory practices in which learners experience and reflect upon decision-making, responsibility, and the social consequences of models. Our program was designed within the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei project and aligned with the Lombardy guidelines L’Arte di Imparare, which emphasize a shift from the teacher as lecturer to the teacher as designer of learning environments. COTS board games are conceptual‐ ized as accessible “complex systems” that embody feedback loops, resource conflicts, probabilistic events, and ethical dilemmas—conditions that mirror contemporary civic life shaped by datafication and algorithmic governance. Unlike many instructional games, COTS games generate authentic emotional dynamics (tension, frustration, solidarity, hope, fear of failure) that can be pedagogically leveraged to foster resilience and reflective judgment rather than performance anxiety and withdrawal. The study reports a pilot implementation conducted with a volunteer sample of secondary STEM teachers in Northern Sardinia, Italy, within a 12-week hybrid course combining workshops, online meetings, collaborative game analysis, classroom prototyping, and guided reflection. Teachers engaged in iterative design cycles: selecting games, deconstructing mechanics through the MDA framework, planning learning sequences, and incorporating student co- design to support epistemic agency. A mixed-methods evaluation included the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES) and the Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ), complemented by open-ended reflections. Preliminary results indicate increased teacher confidence in designing engagement-oriented activities, strong immersion and perceived competence during gameplay, and a growing professional identity centered on facilitation, mediation, and ethical responsibility. Two case studies illustrate how the approach operationalizes democratic citizenship education through technoscientific literacy and emotional empowerment. Maxwell’s Daemons supports probabilistic reasoning, network thinking, and model- based explanation within playful competition; Forgotten Odyssey: The Damned of Asinara situates resource optimization and risk management within historically grounded ethical choices and collective responsibility. Across both cases, generative AI functioned as an emotional–cognitive mediator: a dialogic partner for scenario expansion, reflective feedback, personalization, and metacognitive prompts that helped teachers (and potentially students) articulate assump‐ tions, monitor emotional states, and evaluate AI outputs critically rather than accept them as authoritative. Overall, the paper contributes a replicable framework showing how the convergence of board game design, emotional intelligence, and AI-supported reflection can counter technocratic reductionism and support democratic learning as a lived, relational practice—preparing educators and students to inhabit complex systems with greater clarity, care, and civic responsibility.