Learner Collaboration in Digital Game Making: An Emerging Trend

Twenty-First Century skills like creativity, problem solving and collaboration are acknowledged as fundamental in the technology-driven knowledge society. Increasingly, education is being called on to support the development of such skills from the earliest years. This paper examines a promising methodology for this purpose, Learners' Digital Game Building (LDGB) and more specifically the design and construction of digital games by learners working together in collaboration. Advocates of Game-Based Learning (GBL) have long espoused its wide-scale adoption as a pillar of modern, learner-centred education. LDGB takes this a step further: when students design and make games rather than just play them, they invest themselves holistically in the learning process. The authors believe that setting LDGB within an explicitly collaborative framework will not only enhance educational affordances, but will also prove an effective way to nurture learners' capacity to collaborate fruitfully, which itself is a key Twenty-First Century Skill. The paper discusses the theoretical basis for LDGB and describes its actuation in a European research project called MAGICAL. The project aims to generate tools, resources and teacher know-how for implementing collaborative LDGB activities, and to verify the validity and applicability of the methodology in primary and lower secondary school.