Voxel generation. Raising awareness for informatics and society among high-school pupils through a game-design project

Abstract

Our research project was aimed at teaching high-school pupils game design skills and raising their awareness for the subject area “informatics and society.” A project-based-teaching approach enabled us to incorporate social learning by having teams of pupils work on informatics-and-society topics and subsequently design their own games. The focus of this article is an online survey conducted twice, at the beginning and end of the pupils’ project participation, showing if and how the participants’ attitudes towards and awareness of informatics and society changed during this school year. We discuss the most important survey results, also in relation to studies on internet use of adolescents in the German-speaking countries. Additionally, an evaluation group discussion with the involved teachers provides expert validity. We found that our project-based and social-learning approach was successful in raising awareness for informatics and society as well as in teaching game design.