Project overview
The GameChangers initiative, co-founded by Sylvester Arnab, focuses on the design and implementation of playful learning experiences, promoting the emergence of a more playful, exploratory, creative culture in everyday academic contexts. GameChangers is both an open game design course and community, co-created by the Disruptive Media Learning Lab of Coventry University together with staff and students interested in exploring the opportunities of creating games as a medium for both expression and learning.
The GameChangers initiative is also an award-winning practice-based research programme, which focuses on the design and implementation of playful and gameful learning experiences, promoting the emergence of a more exploratory, creative culture in everyday academic contexts, and exploring the opportunities of creating games and game-like solutions as a medium for both expression, learning and practice.
GameChangers has produced impactful research outcomes through novel investigations into transdisciplinary and holistic game design practices. The research has informed game-based pedagogical and development methodologies and recommendations that are empathically personalised to different stakeholders, which are being adapted and adopted by researchers, game developers and teachers internationally. The underpinning research has also led to various research projects funded by prestigious funders such as the UKRI and the EU Commission (value of over £9 million since 2015, and we have most recently in 2019-2020 been awarded over £1.5 million through the UKRI-ODA Global Challenges Research Fund to further expand the impact of our game-based learning approaches into South East Asia).
Project objectives
GameChangers has the goal of facilitating new models of teaching and learning and new practices in cross-disciplinary learning/collaboration through the use of game design and game thinking for creative problem solving. Most importantly, GameChangers aims to make game creation and game literacy more culturally open and accessible to learners and educators internationally, including those in marginalised communities.
GameChangers aligns with the targets set by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) as part of CU’s continuing responsibility to deliver inclusive and equitable quality education opportunities for all. The project has, and continues to impact all levels, including primary, secondary and tertiary education on an international scale.
GameChangers has been prolific in investigating, implementing and establishing models, frameworks and tools for breaking the barriers to innovative playful learning. Apart from educational bodies in South East Asia, our pedagogic methods and tools are also widely adopted by other organisations, such as Jack Arthur’s Business School in Trinidad and Tobago, University of Cote D’Azure in Nice, Institute of Play in NYC, CU Flying Faculty in China. GameChangers has also informed the empathic GBL approach the Beaconing project that has produced a software for gamified learning authoring that has engaged with 6,000 teachers and students across 10 countries.
