Pedagogy in the Making

Educator Game Jams as Constructionist Professional Development

What do educators learn when they learn through making games together?

Game-based learning research increasingly explores students as game designers. There is considerably less attention, however, to what happens when educators themselves become game makers.

This project explores educator-focused game jams as a form of constructionist professional development.

Rather than asking whether the finished games are good educational games, we ask a different question:

What do educators learn while they are making, testing, arguing about, breaking, and revising games together?

The premise is simple: sometimes the professional learning isn't in the thing you make.

It's in the making.

The Idea in Brief

Make it visible → play it → encounter the unexpected → discuss → revise → reconsider the pedagogical idea

The Central Questions

Why Educators as Game-Makers?

A substantial body of game-based learning research examines learners playing games, while a growing literature considers the benefits of learners designing and making games.

Constructionist approaches suggest that learning can happen through the process of making something that can be examined, manipulated, tested, and revised.

But what happens when we apply that logic to educators?

Instead of asking educators to attend professional development about pedagogy, an educator game jam gives them a problem and asks them to construct a pedagogical response.

They have to make decisions.

They have to negotiate.

They have to test their assumptions.

They have to experience their own design from the player's perspective.

And, inevitably, something goes wrong.

That last bit is rather useful.

A game jam creates a bounded environment in which educators can experiment with pedagogical ideas without having to immediately implement them in a real classroom.

What is an Educator Game Jam?

An educator game jam is a collaborative, time-constrained design activity in which educators work together to create a game around a particular pedagogical theme or problem.

The emphasis is not on producing a commercially polished game.

Instead, participants move rapidly through cycles of:

UNDERSTAND → DESIGN → MAKE → PLAYTEST → NOTICE → REVISE

The game becomes a thinking object.

It gives educators something concrete to argue about, play with, break, improve, and learn from.

The process also shifts professional development away from simply receiving pedagogical ideas towards experimenting with them.

About the Study

3 Game Jams

The study examines three educator game jams. Each used the same broad collaborative design format, but each addressed a different pedagogical problem.

BELONGING

Themes: Inclusive learning · participation · agency

Participants: UK higher education faculty; business and teaching specialities

Participants designed games around questions of belonging and inclusive learning.

The design challenge created opportunities to think about who gets to participate, how agency is distributed, and what happens when different learners experience the same environment differently.

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SUSTAINABILITY

Themes: Complex systems · interdependence · consequences

Participants: UK higher education faculty and graduate students; business and engineering specialities

Participants designed games around sustainability.

This required them to grapple with interconnected systems, competing priorities and the consequences of decisions that affect multiple actors or parts of a system.

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ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Themes: Uncertainty · risk · opportunity

Participants: European higher and further education faculty; business, entrepreneurship, education, engineering, and career services

Participants designed games around entrepreneurship.

Here, the design problem foregrounded uncertainty, risk, opportunity, and decision-making in situations where outcomes could not be completely predicted.

Same process. Different problem.

The three jams deliberately provide variation in the pedagogical problem while retaining a broadly consistent collaborative design process.

This makes it possible to explore what happens across different themes rather than treating a single game jam as an isolated example.

What Did We Study?

The important methodological choice was this:

We studied the making, not just the games.

The project uses a qualitative exploratory approach across the three game jams.

Data include:

participant reflections
design artefacts
observation notes
post-event discussions

Rather than evaluating the finished games primarily as educational products, analysis focuses on what participants were doing and thinking during the design process.

In particular, we examined engagement with:

SYSTEMS

How do different elements of a learning environment interact?

NARRATIVE

How does framing a problem as a situation or story shape how it is understood?

PLAYER EXPERIENCE

What does the learner actually experience when interacting with the design?

COLLABORATION

How do educators negotiate different interpretations and ideas?

AGENCY

Who gets to make meaningful decisions?

UNCERTAINTY

What happens when outcomes cannot be fully predicted or controlled?

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These concepts are not separate boxes. In practice, they frequently collide.

A seemingly simple design decision about a rule can suddenly become a question about agency.

A playtest can expose an unintended consequence.

A disagreement about a mechanic can reveal a disagreement about what learners should actually be doing.

That is precisely the kind of professional learning this study is interested in.

What Are We Seeing?

The findings are preliminary, but our current observations suggest that educator game jams can create a constructionist professional learning environment.

Participants have opportunities to:

MAKE: Turn abstract pedagogical ideas into something tangible.

Instead of discussing “learner agency” in the abstract, educators have to decide where agency actually exists in their game.

PLAY: Experience a design from the learner's perspective.

The moment someone else plays your game, assumptions that were invisible during design can become very visible.

NOTICE: Encounter unexpected consequences.

A mechanic intended to encourage collaboration may create competition. A carefully designed choice may turn out not to be a meaningful choice at all.

NEGOTIATE: Work through competing interpretations.

Collaborative design requires educators to articulate why they think something should work, and to encounter other people's understandings of the same pedagogical problem.

REVISE: Change the design in response.

The iterative nature of game making makes revision part of the process rather than evidence that the original idea failed.

REFLECT: Reconsider teaching and learning.

The process can prompt participants to reflect on learning objectives, learner agency, uncertainty, and the role of the educator.

Implications

The Game as Thinking Object

One of the most interesting implications is that the game does not have to be finished for learning to happen.

In fact, an unfinished or slightly broken prototype can be extremely useful.

A prototype externalises an idea.

Once an idea exists in some tangible form, people can ask:

What is this actually asking the learner to do?
Where is the learner making decisions?
What happens if they make the “wrong” choice?
What did we assume the player would understand?
What happens when they don't?
What did we accidentally make important?
What happens if we change this rule?

The rough game becomes something that educators can think with.

This is one of the ways the game jam connects constructionist learning with professional reflection: educators are not simply talking about pedagogical practice. They are constructing representations of it and then examining those representations.

From Delivering Information to Designing Experiences

A recurring theme in the project is a possible shift in how educators conceptualise teaching.

Rather than primarily asking:

What content do I need to deliver?

game design can encourage questions such as:

What experience am I asking the learner to have?
What decisions will they make?
What will they notice?
What happens when their expectations are wrong?
What can they change?
What happens because of what they choose?

This does not mean that content becomes irrelevant.

It changes the relationship between content, activity, and experience.

The educator becomes, at least temporarily, a designer of a learning environment rather than simply a transmitter of information.

Why Constructionism?

Constructionism, associated particularly with Seymour Papert and colleagues, extends the idea of learning through making.

The central insight for this project is not simply:

People learn by making things.

It is closer to:

Making something gives people an object with which they can think.

A game is particularly interesting in this respect because it is simultaneously:

a set of rules
a model of a situation
an interaction
an experience
a social object
and a representation of someone's assumptions about learning.

When educators make a game together, those assumptions become negotiable.

They can be played.

They can be challenged.

They can break.

And they can be changed.

The Professional Learning Loop

The emerging model can be thought of as a cycle:

PEDAGOGICAL IDEA
↓
MAKE IT VISIBLE
↓
PLAY IT
↓
ENCOUNTER THE UNEXPECTED
↓
DISCUSS
↓
REVISE
↓
RECONSIDER THE PEDAGOGICAL IDEA

The important thing is that the cycle does not necessarily end with a finished game. The revision of the educator's thinking may be the more important outcome.

What This Might Mean for Professional Development

Educator game jams potentially offer a different model of pedagogical professional learning.

Instead of:

EXPERT → CONTENT → EDUCATOR

the structure becomes more like:

PROBLEM → MAKING → PLAY → REFLECTION → COLLECTIVE LEARNING

This creates a space in which educators from different disciplines can contribute different forms of expertise.

It also means that professional development can begin with a shared design problem rather than a requirement for everyone to arrive with the same disciplinary knowledge.

A physicist, historian, psychologist, and business educator might approach a game-design problem very differently.

That difference is not necessarily a problem.

It can become part of the learning.

A note about Play

“Playful” does not necessarily mean frivolous.

The game jam format introduces constraints, experimentation, uncertainty and permission to try things that might not survive contact with a real classroom.

The playfulness is useful partly because it changes the stakes.

Participants can make a deliberately bad mechanic.
They can test an absurd idea.
They can discover that something doesn't work.
They can start again.

That creates a different kind of professional conversation from one in which educators are expected to present polished practice.

Moreover, it opens space for both educators and learners to experiment and become more comfortable with operating under uncertainty, an increasingly essential modern capacity.

What We Don't Yet Know

This poster presents an exploratory study.

The three game jams provide an opportunity to examine professional learning as it happens through collaborative game making, but they do not allow us to claim that every educator game jam will produce the same outcomes.

The preliminary findings raise questions rather than closing them.

For example:

Which elements of the game jam process are most important for professional learning?
Does the learning come primarily from making, playing, discussion, iteration, or the combination of these?
How does the disciplinary background of participants shape the process?
What kinds of pedagogical concepts are particularly well suited to game-based exploration?
What happens to educators' thinking after the jam, when they return to their own teaching?
Can game jams support sustained changes in pedagogical practice rather than short-term reflection?
How might the format work with different groups, disciplines and institutional contexts?

The next stage is therefore not simply to ask whether educator game jams “work”.

It is to understand how the making process becomes a site of professional learning.

The Bigger Idea

We often ask educators to think about teaching.

We sometimes ask them to talk about teaching.

We increasingly ask them to reflect on teaching.

This project asks:

What if we asked them to build something together, and then learn from what happens when they try to play it?

The game is the artefact.

The making is the professional development.

Selected Further REading

The full project draws on literature from constructionism, game-based learning, professional reflection, co-creation, and teacher/educator learning.

Here are some useful starting points should you wish to learn more; refer to the full conference abstract for additional citations:

Constructionism & learning through making

Harel, I. & Papert, S. (eds.) (1993). Constructionism: Research Reports and Essays, 1985–1990.

A foundational collection for understanding constructionism and the idea that making things can provide powerful contexts for thinking and learning.

Kafai, Y.B. (2006). “Playing and making games for learning: Instructionist and constructionist perspectives for game studies.” Games and Culture, 1(1), 36–40.

A concise and particularly relevant bridge between constructionist learning and game making.

Kafai, Y.B. & Burke, Q. (2015). “Constructionist gaming: Understanding the benefits of making games for learning.” Educational Psychologist, 50(4), 313–334.

A key source for the distinction between learning through playing games and learning through making them.

Morado, M.F., Melo, A.E., & Jarman, A. (2021). “Learning by making: A framework to revisit practices in a constructionist learning environment.” British Journal of Educational Technology, 52(3), 1093–1115.

Useful for connecting constructionist theory with the practical design of learning environments.

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Educators, teachers, & game-based learning

Chee, Y.S., Mehrotra, S., & Ong, J.C. (2015). “Authentic game-based learning and teachers' dilemmas in reconstructing professional practice.” Learning, Media and Technology, 40(4), 514–535.

Particularly relevant to the question of what happens when game-based learning requires educators to reconsider their existing professional practices.

Foster, A. & Shah, M. (2020). “Principles for advancing game-based learning in teacher education.” Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 36(2), 84–95.

Useful for considering how game-based learning can be incorporated into teacher education and professional learning.

Molin, G. (2017). “The role of the teacher in game-based learning: A review and outlook.”

A useful overview of the changing role of educators within game-based learning environments.

Sindhi, H. (2023). Pedagogies of reform: The role of game-based learning in recontextualizing education.

A doctoral study exploring the broader pedagogical implications of game-based learning.

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Reflection & professional learning

Brookfield, S.D. (2017). Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher.

A foundational text for thinking about critical reflection in teaching practice; particularly useful alongside the idea of using game prototypes as objects for reflection.

Shields, M., Northcote, M.T., Reynaud, D. & Kilgour, P.W. (2015). Role-Playing as a Tool to Facilitate Learning, Self Reflection and Social Awareness in Teacher Education.

Relevant to the use of role-play and simulated experience as a way of making teaching practice available for reflection.

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Co-creation

Bovill, C. (2020). “Co-creation in learning and teaching: The case for a whole-class approach in higher education.” Higher Education, 79(6), 1023–1037.

Useful for thinking about students and educators as active contributors to the design of learning and teaching rather than simply recipients of predefined educational structures.

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