An awareness-raising pinball: designig and prototyping a serious game with product design student

Serious games represent a promising learning opportunity for both gamers and game designers. A player's personal experience can be used by game designers to convey a message. Learning by playing is a real possibility, as presented in this work. During the serious game design process, the designer must decide how to convey a complex message, organizing it into an engaging narrative.
The use of serious playing methods has advantages not only for the players, but also, in an educational and training context, for the designers. This contribution focuses on the didactic experience carried out by product design students during a 5-week workshop at the Iuav University of Venice. The project aimed to develop and prototype a real working pinball machine. Pinball was an opportunity to use the serious game approach to communicate and understand socially relevant issues, as example Global Sustainable Goals (UN).
This contribution describes in detail the methodology used in the teaching experience, the whole process followed by students and teachers and, above all, the results obtained by each group. Finally, the strategy for assessing the awareness achieved by the student on the relevant chosen topic is discussed.