Emotion Detectives: Co-Designing Inclusive SEL Games with Preschool Children

This study reports on "Emotion Detectives," an exploratory co-design workshop within a broader Educational Design Research project aimed at building an inclusive digital educational game for preschool children. Its central argument is that young children are rarely treated as genuine co-designers of digital learning tools, and that this exclusion stems from methodological choices rather than developmental limits. The work is framed by the CASEL-5 social-emotional learning competencies and Universal Design for Learning principles, and it seeks to show how preschoolers and caregivers can translate abstract social-emotional skills into concrete game elements.

The workshop involved seven children aged three to six, six of whom had a diagnosed disability, together with eleven caregivers recruited through a single disability support association in Portugal. Each family group was randomly assigned one CASEL-5 dimension and produced a protagonist biography, a three-act narrative storyboard, and a low-fidelity interface sketch over a two-hour session. Data consisted of researcher field notes and photographs of the artefacts, analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. Five prototypes emerged, featuring non-human protagonists whose emotional struggles were resolved through relational repair, cognitive redirection, help-seeking, accessibility-aware branching choices, and bodily-care guidance.

The thematic analysis yielded recurring patterns: protagonists served as symbolic containers for anger, frustration, and vulnerability; families favored consequence-based outcomes over punitive ones; and accessibility and representation were integrated into the core design rather than added afterward. From these observations the authors derive four preliminary principles for SEL-oriented preschool games, namely symbolic distance through non-human protagonists, fail-soft feedback, embedded accessibility and representation, and balanced CASEL-5 coverage. The study acknowledges significant limitations, including a small convenience sample from one association, reliance on paper artefacts rather than functional prototypes, and its status as an early generative phase. Planned next steps include replication across more diverse regions and populations, development of a working prototype, and classroom testing in Portuguese preschools.