The Construction of Collective Game Structure from Children’s Partial Understandings

This study conceptualised collective motor game rules as cultural artefacts negotiated in and through action. It analysed how a classroom game emerged and stabilised from children’s individual understandings of a rule-governed structure, focusing on processes of negotiation and adjustment in shared activity. A qualitative case study was conducted with 140 primary pupils (Grades 3–4) who transformed invasion chasing games into invasion games with ball possession during physical education. The design contrasted group design talk, individual pre-game understandings, enacted play (video observation), and post-game narratives, using mediated action and a “collectividual” dialectic as analytical lenses. Three processes were identified: differential salience of rules, practical coordination despite uneven understanding, and stabilisation in action through retrospective reconstruction. Game structure functioned simultaneously as constraint and outcome, and collective play emerged as situated cultural production with implications for educational research and practice.