Investigating the Role-Play Technique in Educational Game Designing Process

Abstract

Educational games (EGs) frequently fail to reach the classrooms they are designed for, and the absence of teachers from the design process is consistently identified as one reason. Participatory design (PD) offers a route to addressing this, but in educational game contexts it has largely positioned children as design partners, with teachers appearing as gatekeepers or evaluators rather than as designers in their own right. In Australia, interdisciplinary exchange between educators and the games industry remains largely undocumented. This paper therefore asks what design knowledge primary school teachers and professional game designers make explicit when placed in structured conversation with one another, and how exchanging roles changes what each group articulates. Three paired co-design workshops, each pairing one teacher with one game designer, were conducted via Zoom with six Australian participants. Within a design thinking (DT) framework, every session ran three scenario-based role-plays: participants first played themselves, then teachers role-played their students, and finally both groups exchanged roles. Data were coded thematically and interpreted through Dewey's theory of experience. The three configurations elicited distinct kinds of knowledge: a client-centred exchange in which designers drew out teachers' requirements; an account of player psychology when teachers spoke as students; and a reciprocal negotiation, marked by initial hesitation, once roles were reversed. Within the bounds of a small purposive sample, the findings indicate that role-play is a fast, low-cost technique for surfacing tacit design knowledge across a professional boundary that is rarely crossed.