What happens when teachers help build educational games? Breakthroughs

Given the chance to help design an educational video game, teachers do not spend much time talking about gameplay. They talk about students.

A study by researchers at SMU, published in the journal Technology, Knowledge and Learning, examined what happens when middle school educators are brought into the design process for video games. The research found that 82% of teachers' design contributions focused on learning outcomes rather than mechanics, a result the authors say points to more effective educational games.

"Teachers are key contributors to the design and development of any classroom resource," said Leanne Ketterlin-Geller, a professor in SMU's Simmons School of Education and Human Development and a co-author on the study. "They know students: what excites them, what challenges them and what motivates them."

An educational Minecraft-based game

The study, led by Yanjun Pan, a postdoctoral researcher at the time of the study, followed eight in-service STEM and computer science teachers from urban middle schools as they participated in the design of Factory Craft, an educational Minecraft-based game aimed at building computational thinking skills in sixth through eighth graders.

Rather than teaching students to write code, Factory Craft was designed to develop deeper problem-solving abilities, including how to break down a complex challenge, analyze data and work toward a solution. Researchers say that emphasis matters increasingly in an era when AI tools can generate code but cannot replace the judgment required to guide and evaluate it.

"People who were classically trained in computer science are learning AI and it is making them way more effective," said Corey Clark, a professor in SMU's Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering and SMU Guildhall and a co-author on the study. "But people who have used AI to replace their learning are way less capable. Experienced people benefit the most from AI because they know how to drive it better.”

Adds Eric Larson, associate professor of computer science at SMU's Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering and also a co-author, "We’re not just building a game to teach computational thinking, we’re building a system that can observe it. The decisions students make, the paths they take, and even the mistakes they correct give us insight into their reasoning. That kind of embedded assessment can reveal skills that are difficult to capture with traditional testing.”

Game built around real learning

That gap between surface-level skill and genuine understanding informed the research team's approach. They used a framework called DeCoAD, which stands for Decomposition, Connection and Activity Design, to ensure the game was built around real learning rather than the appearance of it. DeCoAD was developed as part of a broader NSF-funded initiative at SMU focused on teaching computer science and computational thinking through gaming.The process started by taking K-12 computer science standards and breaking them down into specific, observable behaviors; the things a student would do to demonstrate mastery.

From there, the team looked for places where those behaviors naturally overlapped with actions a player might take in a game. The final step was designing activities around those connections, so that every time a student made a decision in Factory Craft, it was tied to something they were supposed to be learning. Teachers were involved in the first two phases, reviewing the team's work and pushing back where the connections felt forced or the learning goals were unclear.

Teachers in the study brought professional knowledge across three areas: understanding how students learn and where they struggle, knowing which instructional strategies work, and identifying gaps between what the curriculum requires and what students are taught.

That last area produced some of the study's most practical design recommendations. Teachers said that skills like data cleaning and planning are regularly skipped in classroom instruction because there is simply not enough time to cover everything the curriculum requires. Students learn to work with data but rarely learn to check whether that data is reliable before using it. They want to jump straight to solving a problem rather than mapping it out first.

Educational Games Addressing Hard-to-Teach Concepts

Teachers suggested the game could address both gaps by making them unavoidable. In Factory Craft, players who skip data cleaning face consequences that block their progress. Planning is built into the task itself, so students cannot advance without completing it first.

Ketterlin-Geller said the findings offer a model for the field.

"We hope other developers will take on the call to create games that address hard-to-teach concepts," she said. "Start by having conversations with teacher partners to find common ground and identify an area that is important for them to solve."

The study was co-authored by Ching-Yu Tseng, a current doctoral student at SMU who will graduate in May, in addition to Pan, Larson, Ketterlin-Geller and Clark.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1933848, as part of the Teaching Computer Science and Computational Thinking with Gaming project. Any opinions, findings and conclusions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.