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 tasks 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  of research questions to learn more about the topics raised in the discussion. Students then chose their final topic, conducted targeted research, brainstormed game ideas, and chose one idea to storyboard & execute. They worked through the iterative design project to create multiple drafts of their game, play-testing and receiving feedback from peers, content area teachers and myself along the way.  Some students also received feedback from graduate students in the Game Design MFA program at NYU. The 10th graders presented their game as their Arts PBAT in June. 

Students were able to choose any topic for their game.  The most popular topics were anti-racism, environmental concerns, animal welfare, educating players about one's culture or religion, and promoting peace and compassion.  In the past we had used a sort of ranked-choice voting system to narrow the options down to 5-6 topics, however this past 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 model 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 and time consuming.  However, the open choice had so many other benefits that it was worth the additional effort on my part.

This was a long project that required a challenging level of perseverance and sustained interest. One thing that stood out was that for many students, the connection they felt for their topic helped to sustain them. This was true for students who struggled with the technology,  as well as those who understood the basics but took on more challenging technical tasks to make a more sophisticated product. This was especially true for many of my SIFE students. The curated examples include the entire range of English and technical proficiencies of the students in my classes. 

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 and express ideas important to them while learning from each other's different interests. It was truly a joy to witness the pride with which they presented their own, and played each others' games.