Co-designing a bean-themed game with school children

Games offer a fun approach to talk about complex topics and problems. Involving key stakeholders (including schoolchildren) in their design ensures games are relevant and engaging to the target group, while offering an opportunity for children to learn more about the journey of beans from farm to fork in the food system.

This part of the BeanMeals project assessed the impact of playing a codesigned game with primary school children on their willingness to eat bean-based meals. Game co-design formed part of a range of school-based activities, including tasting sessions and educational materials.

The BeanMeals project team includes researchers from different disciplines with expertise in food systems, agroeconomics, systemic innovation, food policy, legume breeding, public health, and behaviour change, as well as project partners Food for Life, local city and county councils, and a game designer. To co-design the bean-themed game, the game designer also worked alongside:

The game designer focused on treating children as ‘design partners’. To do this, the game designer carefully chose language used to describe activities, clothing (BeanMeals hoodies) and sitting on the floor to avoid being seen as a teacher. Children were encouraged to write and draw in the game designer’s notebook and received a ‘BeanMeals game designer’ sticker.

Children were given the freedom to approach the game design activity in their own way, to work together or separately, with different materials to ensure activities could be adapted to each child’s own expressive needs.

The research team highlighted the importance of building on existing connections with schools developed by project partners, Food for Life.

Game co-design activities provided the opportunity for the game designer to gather information on children’s knowledge of beans and visual representations of parts of the food system. A bank of ideas for illustrations, game narratives and mechanics was created from children’s game ideas, and these were used to develop game prototypes and graphics:

Game playtesting sessions with Year 5 school children highlighted key learning regarding formats that might work less well in a classroom environment (e.g., if tasks took too long then children got distracted and started talking to one another).

Children enjoyed the game co-design sessions, with teachers noting children’s engagement. Potential positive outcomes for children involved in the game co-design process were highlighted by the game designer: "I feel like that there’s kind of a collateral benefit in doing this kind of stuff with kids in terms of making them feel that they matter," noting that "a lot of them reported feeling important and really proud."