Digital games offer powerful opportunities for learning, meaning making, and engagement across educational contexts. Narrative-driven and exploratory games, in particular, have been shown to support critical literacy, systems thinking, ethical reasoning, and identity development. However, recent scholarship has stressed the importance of directing attention towards the broader external factors and contexts that influence school-based digital game implementation.
Key Findings Presentation
This presentation first shares key findings from a research partnership between The University of Sydney, game development company Secret Lab, and an independent secondary school in Sydney, which integrated Night in the Woods into the English curriculum. Findings reveal that students’ meaning making extended beyond narrative interpretation to include embodied interaction, exploratory play, multimodal analysis, and ethical decision-making. Teachers, however, frequently encountered infrastructure challenges as well as tensions in attempting to scaffold and analyse gameplay using print-centric approaches. In response, we propose a framework for layered gaming literacies that conceptualises meaning making through digital games as emerging through the dynamic interaction of player positioning, mechanics, agency, multimodality, gameworld relationality, narrative architecture, and embodied affect.
The presentation then explores the subsequent development of Ludolio, a digital platform designed to enable school and university libraries to make games accessible to students and educators. By positioning games as lendable, playable texts, Ludolio seeks to address a critical infrastructural barrier to game-based learning. Design-based research informed the development of learning analytics, dashboard features, and curriculum materials that support teaching with games. The presentation situates games as complex cultural texts that combine narratives, mechanics, visuals, sounds, and player agency, and argues that they require new forms of educational infrastructure as well as pedagogy and assessment.
Meet Dr Jen Scott Curwood
Dr Jen Scott Curwood is an Associate Professor in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at The University of Sydney in Australia, Director of the Sydney Games and Play Lab, and core member of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Trust, and Governance. Her research explores the intersections of literacy, creativity, and technology in order to advance social change and build more sustainable futures. As a university teacher educator, she examines how teachers can leverage innovative technologies to cultivate young peoples’ digital and critical literacies. Her research has been published in leading journals such as the Journal of Literacy Research, Teaching Education, and Learning, Media, and Technology. She earned her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, USA.
Practical information
Session format: 45 minutes seminar with presentation followed by discussion and Q&A
Location: Elektronisk klasserom, 3.etasje, Georg Sverdrups hus
Session moderator: Fredrik Mørk Røkenes