LEARN TO DESIGN VS DESIGN TO LEARN: ENHANCING EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES USING GAME TECHNOLOGY Supawan Prompramote, Kathy Blashki and Sophie Nichol School of Information Technology Faculty of Science and Technology Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia ABSTRACT Recognizing as children’s input in game design and development process is critical, we applied cooperative inquiry experiences working with young children as game design partners. The computer-based games specifically were designed and developed for the acquisition of survival literacy by 12-14 year old intellectually disabled children. During the design and development game process, children learnt game design techniques without their acknowledgement. Importantly, the development process will be undertaken by the students with the minimum guidance of team members. The experiences, challenges and lesson learned through game design process are discussed. KEYWORDS Children, Children design partners, cooperative inquiry, game design techniques 1. INTRODUCTION There has been formal and anecdotal evidence that when students are engaged in the learning process, they learn and retain more (Bisso and Luckner, 1996; Rose and Nicholl, 1998; Fink, 2002). Beavis (1999) connects curriculum content to young people’s engagement with texts outside of the classroom as a method of providing challenging learning environments. Many research studies (Bekker et al., 2002; Robertson and Good, 2005; Eisenberg, 2005) have followed the idea by develop an innovative and creative works that use play as one of their principal learning tools. The formal education curricula have also become recognize play as an essential activity in a child’s development. Play has high-valued attribution as a component of learning experiences when it comes to computers and play. The term of ‘computer’ and ‘play’ automatically brings to mind the computer-based game, which means fun and non-education to children. The global computer-based game market is worth billions of dollars and exceeds that of the film industry. Surprisingly, educational games share an only small portion of the global market. Commercial ‘edutainment’ products have failed to take advantage of this potential for effective educational use despite substantial research on the educational potential of digital games in the last two decades. Hence, there are still a gap between tools for learning, represented by educational software, and tools for fun, represented by computer games (Kafai, 2001; Roussou, 2004). Children have their own likes, dislikes, opinions, and needs that are different from adults; thus, children’ input should be taken into account in game design and development process, in particular educational games. The involvement of children in design process will allow children to feel as they are truly inventors, so that they know what it means to invent new designs when they later begin prototyping (Druin, 2002; Druin and Fast, 2002). This paper focused on using the research methods which were developed and modified for work with children to enhance the acquisition of survival literacy learning process of children aged between 12 and 14 who are classified as mildly intellectually disabled using game technology. Children are provided with concrete models of different contrasting games before designing and creating their own games. In addition, IADIS International Conference Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction 2007 145