Playing Emotions: Designing an EducationalResource That Promotes Emotional EducationThrough Independent Video Games

Abstract

This work covers the first stages of a process for designing and implementing an educational resource that aims to promote social and emotional competences in secondary students through independent video games. We start reviewing different educational uses of games based on the main learning theories. Then we highlight the strengths of independent games, focusing on the possibilities that they offer for promoting variables such as self-esteem, empathy, identification of emotions, responsible decision making, and creativity. After explaining the peculiarities of design-based research, we define the problem that guides this work (the lack of resources for teachers), we show the first version of our proposal based on a sociocultural theoretical framework, and we present strategies for gathering information from teachers to improve the quality of the educational resource. We conclude by showing some of the teachers’ first reactions after a face-to-face workshop where we presented the resource and the ways that their vision would impact future versions.