Maker-based education holds promise as a method to support students’ development of essential skills and content knowledge across the curriculum. Over a five-year period, the authors developed and iterated on an experiential instructional design specifically designed to afford educators with diverse academic backgrounds and divergent career goals not only the opportunity to learn about maker-based teaching and learning but also to experience a maker-based learning environment. This design case begins by outlining the challenges the designers faced. Then, it describes in detail the instructional design and concludes with reflections on the process, which have informed us as a team of designers.

“The Ballad of Proxima-B” is an educational RPG that promotes learning and collaboration. Students contribute to world-building and game mechanics, creating fictional worlds and characters, including a dystopian Earth, the planet Proxima-B, and alien races. The game incorporates constructivist, constructionist, and Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI) principles. The hands-on and collaborative nature facilitates learning, reflection, and a strong classroom community. During gameplay, characters form alliances, encouraging students to reflect on their interactions. Design challenges include workload balance and addressing student anxiety. Game elements emphasize critical thinking and self-reflection, foster collaboration and community, and encourage exploring identity through serious play.

This design case describes the thought processes associated with redesigning an educational technology course for undergraduate preservice teachers from a 15-week hybrid course to a 5-week online course. The redesign is part of a push to create more flexible courses for working and rural students to remain competitive despite multiple alternative licensure paths now available to aspiring teachers. The designers face and overcome challenges regarding right-sizing the course content and assignments while maintaining student engagement. Additionally, the designers discuss how they streamlined the course without sacrificing standards or critical and relevant topics, like AI in education. The case details the development of the online course within the learning management system (LMS; Google Classroom) and the design questions that emerge during that process. The redesigned 5-week course was tested through two iterations in the 2023 summer semester: Summer 1 and Summer 2. The designers collected student feedback after both runs of the course using the standard course evaluation survey, their own Google Forms survey, and the instructor’s reflections. The feedback from Summer 1 informed the Summer 2 iteration. Finally, the designers observed that the experience of condensing the course from 15 weeks to 5 weeks required them to think critically about the course goals and how to make the content manageable for students. The redesign was so successful that the course instructor (also a design case author) determined to redesign the 15-week version of the course for Fall 2023 using the new 5-week design as an anchoring point.

Project-based learning is an effective method for students’ learning design. For the “Graphic Design for Interactive Entertainment” elective course, the author uses project-based learning to teach UI and UX design to Universitas Pelita Harapan’s Visual Communication Design Department students. For the project, the author designed a game mechanic. The students of the course later designed visuals for the game. One game that resulted from this project was “Pro Pickpockets”, a game about a group of pickpockets competing to collect valuable prizes for the best pickpockets. This paper elaborates on the design case of Pro Pickpockets as a design project and project-based learning for students in learning UI and UX.

This design case focused on the design of an intervention set aimed at capturing and sharing tacit knowledge in the workplace. The design case demonstrated the design process of expanding a single chatbot intervention into a comprehensive hybrid intervention set to cooperate with learners of different technology competencies and learning needs. This design case also details insights gained by the design team on how to utilize shared design knowledge through different design disciplines to resolve a design problem, and how to make revisions to improve the design.

This design case describes a Welcome Academy for New Faculty in Engineering. To situate the design, this work is mo- tivated by the documented need to make STEM education more inclusive. This need has prompted extensive research on best practices for inclusive teaching, but less is known about how to translate that research into actual teaching practice. This design case addresses that difficulty. Influenced by Thaler and Sunstein’s theory of nudging, the Welcome Academy resets the default to expect inclusive teaching. To develop the design, we organized an off-campus summit to solicit input from current engineering faculty on the question, “What do new engineering faculty need to know about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)?” That input guided the creation of a four-hour workshop, delivered the morning after campus-wide new faculty orientation, that included an icebreaker, basic campus demographics, curated DEI-related resources, a campus tour emphasizing historical power dy- namics, and presentations by current engineering students. To depict the experience of the design, we describe the final implementation, which varied from the design at points, and the unanimously positive feedback from new faculty. That feedback, however, was not the result of a flawless implementation: We also describe a number of failures that will improve subsequent iterations of the Welcome Academy, emphasizing the importance of communication, respect, and flexibility.

A new online orientation course equips students with the tools and skills to thrive in online programs. It welcomes them to the university, introduces the learning management system, fosters peer connection, and locates essential resources. Additionally, it teaches valuable strategies for time management, motivation, and success in online learning. This adaptable base course caters to the university’s diverse online programs while maintaining a core structure. Designed for efficient facilitation by Academic Directors, it also allows for a personalized touch. Surveys indicate the course effectively prepares students for their first online course. Notably, completing the orientation has become the strongest predictor of student retention and academic success. This award-winning approach serves as a valuable example for designing online student orientation programs.

Every teacher aspires to create the ideal lesson! You want to convey the knowledge and skills in the best possible way while also keeping learners motivated. In our design case, we focus on the complex skill of collaborative problem-solving (CPS). In today’s complex world, the acquisition of CPS competencies is considered an important learning goal in education. However, there is limited knowledge on how to teach and assess CPS competencies. In addition to tackling these challenges, we search for new ways of interactive storytelling to implement in the learning materials. Our main design challenge was how to design a learning experience that encourages CPS. To address these challenges, we started in 2020 the project titled Supporting TEamwork in AMbient learning Spaces (STEAMS). In this project, we designed the EDUbox Teamwork, a four-hour learning activity for children between the ages of 10 to 14. In this paper, we describe the iterative process of designing the materials to learn about CPS (i.e., CPS as a learning goal) by doing CPS (i.e., CPS as a method), enhanced by interactive storytelling, for which the design-based research approach was used. The design team consisted of a diverse group of educational researchers, computer scientists, instructional graphical designers, digital storytellers, and teachers. Given the strong collaboration between a research group specialized in computer-supported collaborative learning and specialists in digital storytelling, our design case incorporated insights from both parties. The learning activity was piloted both in in-vivo and in-vitro contexts in collaboration with at least 400 students.

In 2018, the BYU ARTS Partnership Native American Curriculum Initiative (NACI) was developed in response to teacher questions regarding the teaching of Native topics. Despite increased movements towards reconciliation, Native groups continue to be marginalized in Westernized educational settings. Additionally, teachers lack clear guidelines regarding the respectful teaching of Native topics. Describing the challenges we, the NACI team members, faced in our six-year journey partnering with Native groups in Utah, we outline key instructional design decisions we made and identify the culturally responsive principles that guided those decisions. We also advocate for the application of culturally responsive principles and practices in education including the amplification of Native voices in the classroom.

Two graduate-level courses were designed to advance creative, interdisciplinary teamwork among graduate students. Over three years, the two courses underwent three iterations largely focused on refinements to teamwork, which led to high-quality student products. This design case presents the three course iterations, how course design decisions were made, and the kind of results that were achieved. The paper concludes with reflections for designing higher education courses focused on creativity, interdisciplinarity, and teamwork.