Embodying empathy: using game design as a maker pedagogy to teach design thinking

ABSTRACT

This article argues that game design can be used to teach design thinking within a pedagogy of making. It analyzes qualitative survey responses from 12 writing teachers who asked students to design social justice games and argues that games not only give students practice in design thinking but that, as multimodal, embodied systems, games can enact social theories and, as such, be a way for students to empathize with and design for wicked social problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Computer-based learning
• critical theory
• pedagogical theory
• rhetoric of technology
• social theory
• usability studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebekah Shultz Colby

Rebekah Shultz Colby is a Teaching Professor at the University of Denver. She has co-edited The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom and Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games. She has published articles on using games to theorize and teach rhetoric and technical writing in Computers and Composition and Communication Design Quarterly.