#1147: Orchestrating a Web-Based Classroom Game: Balancing Platform Automation and Teacher Work

Multi group classroom games create a run time orchestration problem: teachers must coordinate pacing, content visibility, and group progress in real time. We examine this problem through a classroom enactment of Fall of Artica, a role-based inquiry game delivered in WISE. Using group centered audio, photographs, authoring screenshots, and planning notes, we analyzed 31 identifiable episodes across 13 step transitions, 14 post reveal intervals, and 4 whole class checkpoints. Findings show that lightweight continue gates and in place media enabled the platform to handle within step pacing and visibility, while teacher intervention clustered around logistics recovery, brief procedural alignment, and concept advancing prompts. Whole class convergence remained teacher led, and externally embedded tools increased local recovery work. These findings suggest that, in role-based classroom inquiry, automation is more effective for pre-structured sequencing and visibility than for interpretive, contingent, and convergence work. We argue that platform support redistributed rather than replaced teacher orchestration, and we derive three design implications for the run time enactment of classroom games.