Co-Designing Games with Kids to Address Challenges of Global Migration

Global migration is a critical education issue. Tens of millions of people are currently being displaced from their homelands and around 50 percent of them are children, according to statistics from the United Nations.

How can we ensure that these children have experiences in their new classrooms and other educational settings that help them feel seen, confident, proud, and safe so that their ability to learn is optimized? How can we ensure they feel secure enough to be curious and that their cultural identity and knowledge is respected? A team of fellows from the Learning Sciences Exchange has developed an innovative collection of interactive games, a website, and facilitator guides to help classrooms everywhere address these challenges together.

“For teachers to recognize the cultural aspects that the child is bringing with them into the classroom, that’s a basic necessity for full-on learning,” says LSX fellow Emer Beamer.

The team conducted wide-ranging research, including reading and analyzing existing research studies and learning from in-person interviews by LSX fellow Mariam El Marakeshy in Turkey with adults and children who have experienced migration.

“The interviews showed that migrant children are struggling with expressing their own cultures inside the classrooms, issues of inclusiveness, learning the language, and with the ability to connect to the new culture,” says LSX fellow Mariam El Marakeshy.

The team also virtually interviewed experts from Holland, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa, the USA, and the UK; these experts included entrepreneurs, educators, policymakers, and game designers. They then conducted an initial series of workshops with children to understand how they experience the phenomenon of SuperDiversity of cultures within schools. The group also developed and disseminated a survey to teachers worldwide to better understand their needs around connecting to their cultural identity in their current settings. LSX fellow Deena Weisberg says the data helped provide the team with teachers’ perspectives on how they talk about culture in their classrooms and how they help to meet migrant students’ needs.

“In the science of learning, when learning happens really well,” explains LSX fellow Margie Worthington-Smith, “one of the key things is to utilize prior knowledge, sometimes known as indigenous knowledge systems, where you recognize and remember something in your own cultural and/or learning experience that you can hook new knowledge on to.”

The group also conducted an audit of toolkits, educational games, and other resources that were designed specifically for their audience of migrant children. This audit helped them to understand the impact and challenges of this area.

“We decided to dive into the idea of games as a potential format for our work to address the sensitivity of this topic in a joyful, positive, and child-led way. From the beginning of the process, child agency was a fundamental value we all aligned on,” says LSX fellow Bethany Koby-Hirschmann.

The group came together in the Netherlands in the spring of 2024 and hosted co-creation and testing workshops centered on children’s needs and cultural diversity.

Children informed the design of the games, gave feedback on all of the games, and reflected on their own experiences using the games in their classrooms.. The team was keen to have professional filming and photography of these workshops, through which teachers and children were interviewed after the sessions to elaborate on their experience and how to improve the games. Their input, and their teachers' reflections on using the games, helped refine the final products and the supporting resources, which became the SuperDiverse Gamekit. All of the games and guides are available on https://superdiversegamekit.org/. The site offers three games — Cultural Bingo, Mystery Box, and Emotion Mural — as well as facilitator guides, printables, reflection sheets, and editable materials, so that teachers and students can create their own games about cultural identity and belonging. All of the materials can be downloaded in English, and there are also editable versions that can be translated into any language. The website also features a report on the team’s process and approach, providing a blueprint for other organizations and collaborative teams that want to create child-centered, co-designed materials to support learning.

The LSX fellows who developed this project are: Emer Beamer, Mariam El Marakeshy, Bethany Koby, Deena Weisberg, and Margie Worthington-Smith.

Hear more of their story in the video below and tap into the resources this group has designed and published at the group’s website, SuperDiverse Gamekit.