Student Game Design¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 4 claims (3 for, 1 against) · 11 studies (4 quant-synthesis, 3 causal, 2 review, 2 theoretical), q1–q4 · 4 of 11 report an effect size

Description¶

In this approach, learners build their own game around a specific course topic or principle. Learners identify learning objectives, design game mechanics, and create rules and content, fostering creativity and critical thinking while reinforcing content knowledge. The learning power comes from the design work itself: to make a game that teaches X, learners must understand X well enough to represent it in rules and feedback structures.

Design Implications¶

Student game design is a constructionist strategy — learning happens through building a shareable artifact Papert's constructionism holds that building external artifacts drives knowledge construction. [+M]. Designing for a real audience forces learners to translate content into mechanics, which requires deeper processing than studying or playing games made by others Authentic audiences raise the quality and effort of student work. [+M]. Choice of topic, theme, and mechanics also supports ownership and motivation Autonomy supports intrinsic motivation. [+S].

Context¶

Requirements¶

• A clear content target: learners must first articulate what the game should teach
• Time for iterative design, playtesting, and revision — a single build session is rarely enough
• Structured design scaffolds (mechanic brainstorming sheets, content-mechanic mapping templates) so learners don't stall on open-ended design
• Opportunities for testing and feedback from peers or the intended audience (Feedback)

Constraints¶

• Time-intensive; design and iteration can crowd out content learning if objectives are not pinned down first [-M]
• Learners may invest effort in surface polish (art, theme) while the underlying content representation stays shallow [-M]
• Groups with limited technical skills may spend cognitive resources on tool mastery rather than content Cognitive overload degrades learning. [-M] — use low-tech (board/card game) or familiar tools to avoid this
• Without a playtesting cycle, flawed mechanics can encode misconceptions about the content [-W]

Implementation Variability¶

• Board/card games vs. digital games: low-tech versions remove technical barriers and foreground mechanics
• Individual vs. team design: teams allow role specialization (content expert, mechanic designer, tester) but risk unequal participation
• Full game vs. modification: learners redesign the rules of an existing game around new content, reducing design load
• Scope: a single mechanic demonstrating one concept vs. a complete game covering a unit

Target Learners¶

• Upper elementary through higher education; particularly effective in technical, design, and teacher-education contexts
• Learners with moderate prior knowledge of the content — enough to represent it, with gaps exposed by design decisions [~M]
• Less suitable as a first encounter with unfamiliar content; learners need some grasp of the material before they can encode it into mechanics

Target Learning Goals¶

• Deep content understanding: translating a concept into rules requires structural knowledge of it
• Systems thinking: seeing how variables, feedback, and constraints interact
• Design and problem-solving skills, including iteration from Practice and playtesting
• Communication and audience awareness: justifying design choices to players and instructors

Instructions¶

1. Define the learning objective(s) the game must teach; require learners to state them explicitly before designing (Application)
2. Analyze existing games to build a vocabulary of mechanics and how they create challenge and feedback
3. Map content to mechanics: for each concept, decide how a player would encounter, act on, and get feedback about it
4. Build a prototype — paper first, digital only if the tool is already familiar
5. Playtest with peers or the target audience and revise based on whether the game actually teaches (Feedback)
6. Present the game with a design rationale connecting each mechanic to the learning objective

Related Strategies¶

• Learning by Teaching — designing a game that teaches others is a form of preparation for teaching that demands deep processing
• Project-Based Learning — game design is a sustained artifact-building project with an authentic product
• Peer Review — playtesting sessions double as structured peer critique

Related Elements¶

• Practice — playtesting is practice for both designers and players
• Feedback — the revision cycle depends on it
• Collaboration — most game design teams divide roles and negotiate design decisions

Patterns That Use This Strategy¶

• Cognitive Apprenticeship — design work makes expert design thinking articulable through critique and rationale
• Collaborative Learning — team-based design with interdependent roles

Examples¶

• Scratch — millions of students design and share games; the community provides authentic audiences and remixable exemplars
• Gamestar Mechanic (E-Line Media) — a platform where learners learn game design by designing, with built-in playtesting and publishing
• Engineering students designing a game to teach middle schoolers about engineering concepts; history students creating a board game based on a historical event, where rule design must reflect causal constraints of the period

Key Sources¶

• Papert, S. (1993). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
• Kafai, Y. B. (1995). Minds in play: Computer game design as a context for children's learning. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Resnick, M., Maloney, J., Monroy-Hernández, A., Rusk, N., Eastmond, E., Brennan, K., Millner, A., Rosenbaum, E., Silver, J., Silverman, B., & Kafai, Y. (2009). Scratch: Programming for all. Communications of the ACM, 52(11), 60–67. doi:10.1145/1592761.1592779
• Plass, J. L., Homer, B. D., & Kinzer, C. K. (2015). Foundations of game-based learning. Educational Psychologist, 50(4), 258–283. doi:10.1080/00461520.2015.1122533