Does Co-discovering Educational Games Design Process between Game Designers and Teachers Converge?

This paper, presented at DiGRA Australia 2022, is an ongoing doctoral study examining whether game designers and primary school teachers converge in their understanding of the educational game (EG) design process when they co-design together. Its central premise is that participatory design (PD) benefits from involving end-users, including teachers and designers themselves as players, yet the Australian gaming industry has rarely explored interdisciplinary knowledge exchange with educators. The study is framed by Dewey's theory of experience and asks how game designers transfer their knowledge to EG design, what obstacles they face, and whether collaborative workshops help them build more engaging learning games.

The research uses a co-designing (CoD) workshop method adapted from PD literature, consisting of six to seven stages (Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Feedback, and Learn) and conducted online via Zoom with six participants across three workshops. Participants first played three primary-level games (Duolingo, Mammals, and Build a Bridge), then evaluated them during the sessions. Data comprise worksheets, audio, and screen recordings, analysed through thematic and cross-case analysis, and the analysis was still in progress at the time of publication.

Preliminary findings suggest that participants valued fun, engagement, motivation, interactivity, and aesthetic appeal, and that game designers were comfortable with the tools while teachers contributed verbally. Challenges included terminology mismatches between the two professional groups and technical issues such as software lag. Both groups reported gaining knowledge, and designers expressed a strong desire for a collaborative platform to gather end-user feedback. The author notes that pandemic-related recruitment limits constrained the sample, and that larger participant groups would be needed to build a framework integrating multiple perspectives into the EG design process.