Learning Ecological Justice and Game Design by Creating Culturally Relevant Digital Transformational Games

In this paper, we explore teaching and learning ecological justice in a transformational game design context with sixteen American BIPOC low-income high school students. Participants took part in a three-session workshop in an urban metropolitan area, where we examined the affordances of a culturally relevant curriculum with our students as they learned about ecological justice. Students were tasked with creating narrative-based transformational games using Twine. Findings suggest that integrating culturally relevant pedagogy deepens students’ engagement and encourages them to share their personal experiences in the transformational games they created, leading to a transformational growth within the students themselves. Although, students’ games relied heavily on facts and guilt as persuasive tools, mirroring patterns in existing climate games, some games demonstrated more sophisticated approaches using restricted choices and narrative complexity. We theorize how this relates to our lessons on game design, the usage of Twine and the wider technological community.