As members of the Digital Education Strategies team within The Chang School of Continuing Education at TMU, we will share our collective experience designing and developing a virtual icebreaker game to support the building of student-student rapport in online courses. We will share why we set out to do what we did, the methodology we used to guide our work, what our user testers taught us, and the joys and challenges that we faced on our iterative journey to inclusive design. In particular, we will highlight how we learned to combine inclusive design principles, cozy game aesthetics, and lots of feedback and research on avatar creation to inform iterative improvements to the game. We will end the presentation with a guided play session of the most recent version of the game, which will be piloted in the Fall 2023 semester.

Attendee Benefits

Key audience takeaways: Questions to ask during iterative game design to ensure the final experience is accessible and inclusive Strategies to implement to ensure educational game design work is efficient and inclusive. We will provide every attendee with a digital set of 3 game design reference cards. Each card will be from the perspective of a different member of the icebreaker game design and development team: Application Developer, UX/UI Designer, and Learning Experience Designer. Each card will outline strategies, lessons learned, and critical reflection questions for inclusive game design. These cards can be a handy reference if approaching a serious game project for the first time or just looking for ways to critically reflect for future improvement.