Privacy Awareness by Online Co-Design: Investigating Reflection and Learning Qualities of Card-Based Educational Game Creation

Abstract

Sharing of personal data, consciously or unconsciously, has become a ubiquitous affair. Even from a young age, students are confronted with privacy choices such as giving consent to sharing personal data when, for instance, using social media or remote learning tools. Despite that, privacy awareness is still an educational area often only addressed superficially. A team-oriented approach through educational game design could help engage students, stimulate thinking, and familiarise them with crucial privacy issues. This paper investigates the reflection and learning qualities of co-designing games for privacy awareness. Addressing the current pandemic circumstances, a playful online workshop is presented that enables remote co-creation of educational game concepts with design cards. By taking the roles of player, teacher, researcher or designer, students worked together remotely to discuss the subject matter, learning assessment and game mechanics to elaborate a balanced game concept targeting everyday privacy issues. The qualities of the co-design workshop to induce reflection and learning were examined in a two-stage user study. First, in a between-subjects trial (n = 61), the ability of the online workshop to encourage reflection about privacy decisions was compared to a paper-based offline version. Second, remote co-designing was further examined in a within-subjects evaluation (n = 32) in which students rated their learning gains in terms of privacy compared to their learning gains in designing educational games. The outcomes of the questionnaire and post-activity feedback indicate that remote and on-location co-design of educational games are equally effective for sparking reflective thinking about privacy decisions. Thus, both can be applied adjusted to contextual conditions regarding social distancing or other requirements. When contrasting learning quality between privacy awareness and game design, remote co-creation showed more supportive of conveying knowledge about balancing the games for learning than about the privacy domain. Conclusively, implications regarding educational game co-design with card toolsets are synthesised from the empirical findings.

Privacy Awareness by Online Co-Design: Investigating Reflection and Learning Qualities of Card-Based Educational Game Creation