Studies have shown that educational video game design has great potential to teach young learners key 21st century skills. Yet, how such learning opportunities are designed has implications for access and equity, especially for marginalized audiences like Indigenous learners. In this presentation, I will discuss how we have collaboratively designed our curriculum to empower Indigenous young people as they learn about design and computational practices while also fostering their own cultural awareness. I will discuss the overall design of our video game workshop as well as design implications for future iterations of our camps.
As part of our collaboratively designed curriculum, we engaged students in learning principles of design in addition to reading contemporary and historical stories relating to a variety of Indigenous cultures. We also encouraged students to share their own narratives through a variety of media including a video-game design platform called RPG Maker. Key findings include the need for: (1) scaffolds that support students’ agency to infuse more of their own cultures within their game design and (2) development of a community-based, sustainable workshop model.
In my concluding remarks, I will share critical design implications from our ongoing efforts as we work toward creating a more sustainable model for program implementation and to scale this model to include more youth and sites across northern Utah. The findings from this line of inquiry has implications for social justice and transforming how we think about STEAM interventions for Native youth, especially in video game design and maker-related contexts.
