Teaching Freedom: The Game
Introduction
Teaching Freedom: The Game is a prototype of an interactive fiction text-based game where players become be a teacher trying to teach using liberation methods at a public middle school. It’s available to play for free on itch.io, a site for hosting indie games.
https://oadikema.itch.io/teaching-freedom-the-game
Methodology
My motivation behind creating the game was to address some of the common struggles that educators may run into when attempting to teach freedom in public schools and the importance for empathy in classrooms. As players go through the game, they can gain and lose empathy points based on the decisions that they make in each scenario.
Through the game, I provide players with an avenue that feels more recreational than academic for engaging with ideas around empathy and teacher-student interaction in the classroom.
Design
Video Walkthrough
Feedback
When I shared the game with my professor and classmates, I received positive and constructive feedback. For positives, they loved the humor embedded in the writing and the realistic classroom scenarios. While they loved how straight forward the storyline is, they wished for more interactive elements like pictures and and audio clips to make the game more fun to play.
Reflection
I was able to dive into the early stages of game design and interactive fiction while building the Teaching Freedom game. My goal was to make a tool that could be used to highlight some of the struggles that educators face when teaching with liberation methods and it is what I accomplished. The project is still its prototype phase and I would love to showcase Teaching Freedom to actual educators working in the field and receive their feedback before working on a version 2.
References
Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the African-American Tradition
by Charles M. Payne (Editor), Carol Sills Strickland (Editor)