2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background & Motivation
Our workshop grew out of an existing research collaboration at [Masked for Review] entitled [Masked for Review] aimed at using serious games and gamification to expand pathways to STEM academic majors and careers. As a team we planned a three day game design workshop for middle school students that 1) fosters interest in computer science careers by exposing students to basic programming concepts; 2) encourages the development of ethical decision-making capacities by designing games that address contemporary challenges in adolescents’ lives; and 3) harness the motivational affordances of games to encourage students to engage in interest driven learning
Project design and execution
We developed a workshop that focuses on identifying place-based challenges youth face in their daily lives. Once they identify a problem, participants use storyboards to create a narrative scenario. Youth designers are then introduced to game mechanics in order to implement player choice into their games. At the end of the workshop, a group of 16 middle school students developed four narrative video games using bitsy where player choice determines the outcome of the game.
Lessons learned through successes or failures
Participants subverted our workshop design through the affordances of branching programming tools. Participants took a game mechanic that was meant to provide players with a sense of agency and used it to express how little agency they feel. Designing games within the constraints of their youth identities ended up reproducing the challenges they experience everyday through game mechanics.
Conclusions and next steps
This study suggests that youth are capable of using game mechanics to convey powerful messages through the possibilities of actions given to players. This finding is particularly relevant for computer engineering educators who hope to connect programming with creative and self-expression opportunities through game mechanics, which may foster aspirations for careers in computer science and engineering.