Peer-reviewed article

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

Junyuan Tan · 29 May 2026

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.