Steady State. A Behavior-Based Educational Game for Time Management

This paper introduces Steady State, a noncommercial, physical, two-player educational board game designed to model behavioral processes involved in time management from a behavior-analytic perspective. Although time management has been widely discussed in psychological and educational contexts, operationalized models are still needed to examine task allocation, postponement, and self-management under controlled conditions. The game models self-management under limited resources by arranging explicit response-consequence relations involving energy and stress tokens, task demands, reinforcement contingent on task completion, and weekly differential reinforcement for balanced engagement across domains. It also embeds self-monitoring prompts. A demonstrative pilot using an alternating treatments design (12 sessions with one dyad) compared the full contingency-based game (Condition A) with a procedural comparison condition in which the main response-consequence relations were minimized and stochastic outcomes were emphasized (Condition B). Embedded performance indices, including task postponements, energy remaining at the end of the session, stress accumulation, and planning time, varied more clearly with individual strategy in Condition A, whereas patterns in Condition B were more strongly constrained by stochastic outcomes. We discuss limitations and priorities for more controlled replication. The pilot was designed not to test educational effectiveness or transfer to everyday time management, but to determine whether the game generates measurable and behaviorally interpretable in-game variability.