"Perhaps this can be for education" : learners' cultural models for educational game design

Infusing games into classroom teaching and learning has been a keen interest among researchers and educators. Game-based learning offers potentials for creating twenty-first century learning environment that promises to better engage our digital generation. Yet, creating educational games that both engage learners and address schools' educational goals remains a challenge when designing games for education. As a response to the perennial problem, we suggest it may be worthwhile to draw on students' funds of knowledge and practices of playing games and learning in and out of school when developing games for learning. We shift the educational gaze on this issue from the teachers' perspectives to that of the learners' to examine the cultural models of the latter's lifeworlds, related to learning with games. Specifically, we present the cultural models of learning, technology, and aesthetics that learners themselves surfaced in an informant design approach. In this approach, five progressive design workshops were conducted as part of a three-year research program conducted with two Singapore secondary schools. Twenty-two students between the age of thirteen and fifteen participated as design partners or informants where their ideas about Earth and computer games were explored. The cultural models presented in this chapter constitute a part of the findings from these workshops. This chapter puts forward the merits of positioning learners as resources not only for their own learning, but also as co-designers of the game to be used as a learning tool. We conclude that accessing learners' cultural models is important to avoid designing twenty-first century pedagogies that are based on assumed needs.