Participatory Design and Opposing Interests in Development of Educational Computer Games

This study examines a participatory design process in which a class of 11- and 12-year-old Danish children was invited to help design a mathematics-education computer game, with the aim of producing a game engaging enough that children would voluntarily play it outside school. The research was conducted by researchers at Learning Lab Denmark and centers on a tension that emerged between the adult development team's pedagogical goals and the children's own interests. The development team, a group of schoolteachers working with a software house, had initially conceived a time-travel exploration game in which the landscape would reflect the history of mathematics, such as ancient Egypt, Greece, and China. The children's ideas, though varied, gravitated toward fantasy settings and tourist-style experiences.

The methodology consisted of two workshop sessions with one class and its mathematics teacher, who was also a member of the development group. Children were initially given no information about the mathematical content or pedagogical goals, and the focus of their work was deliberately narrowed to transportation, travel experience, and game play. One four-boy group, which produced a detailed time-machine concept spanning future, medieval, western, and caveman ages, drew particular attention. The authors observed that one member dominated the group's process, that this created dissatisfaction among the others, and that resolving the conflict ultimately produced the most developed concept. Overall, children responded positively to the travel-game format but found the ancient-history theme unappealing.

The study finds that the children's ideas had little practical effect on the final design. The authors attribute this largely to the early adoption of the developers' concept, which was perceived as strong and difficult to modify, and to an organizational problem: the developers did not attend the workshops, so the implicit knowledge generated there reached them only through researchers as general guidelines that were hard to integrate. The authors conclude that participatory design for educational games requires clearly defined roles for participants, closer collaboration among users, teachers, developers, and researchers, and recognition that narrow educational frames can exclude ideas that would better serve end users.