Impact Game Design
Leveraging Student Choice & Cultural Identity in CS Project Design

The Task
Design and develop a video game that teaches the player about a topic or sheds light on an issue that you  care about.

Overview

One of the major projects in my media arts class last year tasked students with developing an Impact Video Game. An impact game intends to educate or deliver a message to the player. The lesson / message is referred to as the game designer's impact goal. 

The initial process included a discussion of issues important to our / their communities and collaborative brainstorming research questions to inform the impact goal of multiple topics. Students then chose their final topic, conducted research, brainstormed game ideas, and chose one idea to storyboard & pursue. They worked through the iterative design project to create multiple drafts of their game, play-testing and receiving feedback from peers and myself along the way. The 10th graders presented their game as their Arts PBAT in June. 

Students were able to choose any topic for their game. Anti-racism, environmental concerns, animal welfare, educating players about one's culture or religion and promoting peace and compassion- to name a few. In the past we had used a sort of ranked-choice voting system to narrow the options down to 5-6 topics, however last year there were a lot of unique interests and a lot of passion for those interests, so I left it open. The challenge with this was that I had less control over the research portion of the project. With a smaller number of topics I could provide curated research and / or create my own scaffolded readings for students. With a dozen or so different topics, this was much more difficult. However, the open choice had other benefits. 

This was a long project which required a challenging level of perseverance and sustained interest for some students. One thing that stood out was that for many students, the connection they felt for their topic helped to sustain them. This was particularly true for students who chose to share their culture or religion, though not exclusively!

Students built community through the discussions of topics that they care about, collaborating on research and sharing their work in progress and final products. In general, the emphasis on student choice created a classroom culture where students were free to pursue / express ideas important to them and learn from each other's different interests.