Best Practices in Cross-Sector Partnerships for Educational Game Design

This paper, co-authored by Jacob Abell and Lynn Ramey, examines how academic content experts, student partners, and professional game designers can collaborate effectively to create educational games. Its central argument is that the goals of scholars (accurate content and sound pedagogy) and those of game designers (aesthetic coherence, mechanical logistics, and enjoyability) are both essential and can be reconciled through deliberate workflow planning rather than treated as competing agendas. The authors ground these claims in their experience developing "Brendan's Voyage," a five-module language-learning game teaching medieval Anglo-Norman French, developed over more than a decade across solo, student-based, and professional phases.

The work traces three collaborative models: a solo approach that offered creative control but proved impractical for a complex project, a constructivist student-driven lab that built skills but suffered from turnover and weak version control, and a course-integrative model that struggled with continuity between successive student teams. The professional partnership with Causeway Studios, funded by a two-year NEH Level II Digital Humanities Advancement Grant awarded in 2022, forms the core case study. The authors offer best practices including soliciting multiple bids to match budgets and partner strengths, partnering with students at varied skill levels under fair compensation, establishing a clear script-development plan that respects designer expertise while protecting pedagogical goals, and planning data storage and version control from the outset. They also report that cultural input from academics, such as images of an authentic Irish clochán, enriched the game's immersiveness. The paper candidly documents challenges, including translation difficulties and limits on post-launch access to code and assets imposed by proprietary tools and hosting constraints.