Co-designing a civic educational online game with children

Abstract

This study presents the co-design process of an educational game for citizenship, involving children aged 10–14 years old. The game project was born in the context of “Plenarinho”, a portal of the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil. Several authors have shown that using digital games has great teaching potential, as they have important principles of different learning theories. However, the creation of an educational game is a complex process that must focus itself on the educational goals of the demanding organization and on final users’ interests. Notwithstanding, in educational game design, target groups rarely contribute since the beginning of design phases. Facing this, we decided to explore the co-design methodology as a way to find answers to the following question: What type of contributions can a creation process involving children bring along to the design of an educational game? Our study was constituted by two stages. The first stage was made up of meetings with the organization’s team and it was dedicated to the definition of the game requirements. The second stage was the one of co-design with children and was dedicated to collective creativity throughout the design process. It was constituted by six meetings. Results suggest that co-designing with younger users is a promise to successfully conciliate learning into fun and engaging games. Users, despite their age, can provide us information about various game mechanics characteristics, visual and narrative characteristics, helping us to design solutions, which considered both pedagogical and playful sides.