Thank you! 

Thank you! I am glad the student and teacher perspectives are coming through in our video. 

Hi Andee, 

During the empathize phase (the first step in the design thinking cycle), students pick the social (or real world) problem they want to address with the game they want to design. From there, they conduct research, interviews, or observations about their topic to find out exactly what people know (or don't know), value, or do about the topic during the define phase (the next step in the design thinking process). This helps students narrow down the real world problem they want to address. For example, a student might care about endangered species; however, during the define phase, the student might uncover that people do not know about rhinos. Then, they design games to address this particular issue. Some topics lend themselves to games that aim to change people's behaviors (e.g., bullying) while others focus on increasing people's knowledge about that topic.

Regarding parent engagement, yes, I agree with your assessment. It is challenging to find ways to engage parents in their children's STEM learning as co-learners. In our project, we found that parents and children enjoy designing board games together where they can draw from their own experiences of playing board games as a family. The design thinking cycle of empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test helps facilitate the activity, and provides a framework for parents to support their children's making activities.

Thank you for your question, Danielle! We started with designing board games and then had students use Gamestar Mechanic and Scratch for digital games. We are hoping to integrate robotics and electronic textiles. That said, the challenge we are facing is that students need to develop both game design skills and master the tools for creating digital games in a short period. So, while students can create complete and sophisticated games when designing board games, they struggle significantly and need more time when they get into coding. We gave students an option to work individually and in groups.

Thus far, on the parent engagement side, we held a couple of three- hour family events where parents and children came to design games together around a topic they cared. We had more success with board games than digital games. We got positive feedback from parents who usually do not see game design related to STEM learning.

Great question, Kelsey! The best way for teachers to facilitate students' learning is through guided questioning and engaging in whole class reflections at the end of each phase of the design thinking cycle. Students in our project enjoyed exploring social issues, brainstorming ideas, and constructing their games. They struggled the most during 'define' phase where they had to narrow the problem they wanted to address in their games and come up with "How Might We Design a Game that..." questions. It is essential for teachers to scaffold students during this phase so that students become more intentional about the design of their games. During prototyping phase, students need quality feedback to improve their games. Asking questions about how students are thinking about the interactions between the goal, rules, and core mechanics of their game, and how what they are designing connects to their social issue and what outcomes they expect to see after people play their games is key to supporting students' learning. 

Hi Lee! Yes, students, although they play games, usually do not have an understanding of how to design games. Before they start prototyping, we have students play games and deconstruct them. We draw our approach from Gaming the System by Tekinbas, Gresalfi, Peppler, and Santo. We introduce key ideas such as the goal, the rules, and the core mechanics for game design, and highlight the importance of how these different components of a game need to work together to generate a fun and playable game. Also, during the testing phase, we facilitate students' giving each other feedback. For example, students fill out feedback forms where they need to identify one thing that worked well in the game and one thing that the designer(s) can improve. The designer(s) then have to modify their games based on feedback and explain in their design book how they addressed the feedback during the testing phase.   

Hi Erica! Thank for your questions. I listed my answers below:

(1) We experimented with different approaches throughout the year. We started off with giving students a topic where everyone designed a game about the same issue. In another iteration, we gave students two options, and more recently, we just asked students to choose their social issues. The last iteration where we asked students to choose their topics worked the best concerning student engagement and quality of games. That's said, it is hard to parse whether this was due to students having the freedom to focus on an issue they cared or due to them having developed confidence and knowledge around game design over time or both.

(2) We developed a rubric to assess the quality of students' games where we evaluate the clarity of the goal and rules of the game, how different components of the game interact, how challenging the game is (easy, just right, too challenging), and how well the game addresses the social issue. During the testing phase, students give each other feedback about their games, and the feedback form they use also includes the same dimensions as our coding scheme. This way, we can compare/contrast students' evaluation of each other's games and our evaluation of their game.

(3) One of the inferences we can make is about to what degree students understand how to balance the different components of a game to create a playable and fun game. The other inference we can make is about how much students immersed themselves empathizing with their users (players) around the social issue. For example, some students create a simulation of the social problem in their games while others engage their players with the social issue at the surface level (e.g., players earn points by answering fact cards). The alignment between the social problem and the game mechanics also highlights how well students understand the complexity of the social issue and whether or not they were able to narrow down the problem during the 'define' phase of the design thinking cycle. We engage in backward mapping where we first analyze the students' games and then analyze their design notebooks. In students' design notebooks, we look at the information they gathered about the topic during the empathize phase, the point of view statement and 'how might we' question to understand how they narrowed the problem. Finally, we analyze the feedback students received and how well they incorporated the feedback into their games during the prototyping and testing phases.

Hi Alka! The making activities take place during regular science classrooms. Integrating making activities with science content has been challenging, and something we are still working on. The three science teachers featured in the video and I meet every other week to create lesson plans (called 'design challenges') to implement during regular classrooms. Our student population is quite diverse, and across three teachers, we reach about 300 students during the academic year. The key challenge we are facing is around assessment of students' learning. So, although we can craft a design challenge around a science content (or standard), it takes time and effort to come up with assessment strategies-- and this is something all of us who are doing work in the context of making/maker movement. Regarding teacher buy-in, we are fortunate to be working in an International Baccalaureate school that focuses on STEM learning where design and engineering are part of the school culture and curricula.