A year of codesigning with teachers and students
At the Serious Play Conference, Immersed Games presented the first year of its co-creation model. A smaller audience turned the session into an extended discussion, with attendees bringing challenges and questions from their own programs.
The model was built against three problems. The team had been designing in a silo and needed a better process. It wanted real, empowered codesign rather than user testing under a nicer name. And every stakeholder group — Immersed Games very much included — is missing some part of the domain knowledge the work requires.
What emerged runs in six phases: analysis, conceptualization, design, initial playtest, validation, and finalization. Teachers, students, and subject-matter experts each take a different role at each stage — design partner, informant, facilitator, author. Two cohorts run in parallel and swap at validation, so each playtests the other’s storyline before both are published.
Students are the hardest part of the model. They do not have the domain knowledge to give direct feedback on a mathematical approach, and the content is too abstract to reason through in a meeting — expert adults miss the logical leaps too. The workaround is live-action role play, described in why storylines get LARPed before they get built. Rather than asking students to evaluate a design, the team stages the story and observes how they actually reason, react, and engage.
After a year, the storylines coming out of the process are clearly different: more joyful, better designed around real student thinking, and more carefully sequenced with educators. One problem stays open. Student ownership is still lower than the team wants — participation skews toward playtesting rather than designing, contributions tend to be indirect, and context is lost between sessions, which cuts both ways.
