Conference Program

In the contemporary context, education is undergoing a technoscientific transformation that tends to replace slow, situated, and relational practices with models of educational governance linked to datafication, EdTech, and the pervasive diffusion of AI. In this scenario, the digital ecosystem is increasingly opaque: students and citizens struggle to understand the consequences of their actions, profiling mechanisms, dark patterns, and the logic of an "algorithmic governmentality" that transcends the individual. This acute technosocial opacity is not only a cognitive problem, but also an emotional one: uncertainty and the perception of lack of control can produce anxiety, frustration, and withdrawal, hindering deep learning and critical participation. The paper proposes to view this condition as a central challenge for education for democratic citizenship: inhabiting complex systems requires simultaneously critical technoscientific skills and emotional tools to support exploration, deliberation, and conflict without falling into toxic stress or adaptive docility. Within this framework, COTS board games are considered "accessible complexity simulators" capable of safely and reflectively experiencing systemic dynamics such as risk, resource scarcity, feedback loops, cooperation/competition, ethical dilemmas, and trade-offs. Board games, in their "slow" and situated dimension, can become an educational ecosystem that activates ludoliteracy and complex thinking, as well as components of emotional intelligence (affective state recognition, regulation, tension management, tolerance of uncertainty), transforming errors into opportunities for redesign and complexity into resilience and hope, rather than a cognitive block. Finally, the paper explores the role of generative AI in game-based educational programs within the tensions that characterize current algorithmic ecosystems. In a context marked by technosocial opacity, optimization logics, and persuasive design practices, AI is not considered a neutral tool or a pedagogical solution. In this context, AI can be tested as a problematic conversational space, rather than as an epistemic authority: a tool for interrogating decision-making processes and emotional states that emerge in contexts of uncertainty. The integration of analog play — understood as a slow practice that makes the dynamics of complex systems observable — and a limited, reflexive use of AI thus opens up an ambivalent pedagogical space, in which technology does not resolve the opacity of algorithmic systems but can contribute to making them the object of technoscientific critical interrogation.