Creating a Culturally Relevant Game Design Curriculum: Emerging Design Principles

• In Event: 33.024 - Facilitating Learning Through Games and Play

Abstract

This paper shares emerging design principles for creating professional development materials for middle and high school teachers that focus on helping students move from technological literacy to technological fluency. iDesign: Developing Technological Fluency through Culturally-Relevant Game Design is a National Science Foundation-funded design-based research project to create a curriculum for after-school programs that help youth engage in what we call culturally relevant game design practices.

Preliminary findings suggest that, rather than proceeding in a “sequential” course of professional development, teachers required a “concurrent” course that integrates the three phases of culturally relevant game design—design-research-development—into every activity in the curriculum.

Authors

• Roberto Joseph, Hofstra University

• James Patrick Diamond, Education Development Center, Inc.

• Eustace George Thompson, Hofstra University

• Francisco Cervantes, EDC Center for Children and Technology