Let’s Create Our Own World! Fostering Cooperation, Creativity, Empowerment and Intrinsic Motivation in Design Thinking Processes through Edularp Co-Design
This is a method-oriented CHI paper with a clear, somewhat unusual framing: it treats co-designing edularps as the intervention, not just as a playful classroom activity. The contribution is credible and well-bounded, but the evidence remains context-specific and the authors are appropriately cautious about transfer beyond formal education.
Axes Lens
Rare contribution shape, typical evidence profile. The point here is not a score. It is to show what kind of claim the paper makes, and whether the evidence pattern is unusual or baseline in this 268 -review set.
Contribution shape
- Knowledge form
- method knowledge typical · 29/268
- Novelty type
- method typical · 21/268
- Abstraction level
- practice typical · 85/268
- Generalization target
- methodological argument typical · 16/268
- Validation mode
- mixed methods typical · 136/268
Evidence profile
- Evidence strength
- moderate typical · 105/268
- Claim alignment
- strong typical · 231/268
- Overclaim risk
- medium typical · 210/268
Review Summary
This paper’s main value is in its reframing. Rather than presenting educational live-action roleplaying as something students simply do, it argues for co-designing edularps as a participatory method that can be inserted into design thinking, PD, and CD workflows. That is a non-obvious move because it shifts attention from the finished game or roleplay session to the collaborative design process itself as the mechanism for cooperation, creativity, empowerment, and intrinsic motivation. The paper is also unusually explicit about novelty, calling the approach “completely new” and recommending it as part of the PD/CD and educational tool repertoire. At the same time, the evidence is not overextended: the authors state that the work was conducted only in formal education contexts and that they cannot be certain the findings transfer to other PD/CD processes. They also acknowledge that the study captures only a snapshot and does not test sustained learning effects. So the paper’s strongest contribution is method knowledge with a bounded empirical basis. It is best interpreted as a promising, evaluative proposal for a design practice family, not as a broadly generalizable claim about all participatory or educational settings. The award-level recognition is plausible given the clarity of the framing and the relevance of the topic, but the validation scope remains limited and should temper any stronger causal reading.
What Changed
Canon before
Prior CHI/PD/CD work has discussed participatory and co-design methods for education and empowerment, but this paper positions edularp co-design as a new way to practice those goals within design thinking processes.
Departure from common sense
The paper’s non-obvious move is to treat co-designing educational live-action roleplaying games as a design-thinking and participatory-design method, rather than merely using roleplay as an outcome or classroom activity. That reframes game creation itself as the intervention for cooperation, creativity, empowerment, and intrinsic motivation.
Actual novelty
The paper explicitly claims a “completely new approach (to our knowledge)” by focusing on “not only playing but co-designing edularps,” and recommends adding edularp co-design to the PD/CD and educational tool repertoire. The novelty is therefore a method-level contribution centered on co-designing the game form itself.
Evidence
The paper combines three studies in an educational design-thinking context and reports indications that co-designing edularps can support cooperation, creativity, empowerment, and intrinsic motivation. The evidence is framed as evaluative and context-bound, with explicit limits on transferability beyond formal education and on long-term effects.
“ This article reports on an explorative study on the attempt to combine these three potential usages and to meet them from a new angle: designing edularps in a co-creative process as a way to foster creativity, collaboration, empowerment, and intrinsic motivation in design thinking processes – an approach that could be used in education but also in participatory design (PD) or co-design (CD) processes in general”
actual novelty · Conclusion (explicit novelty framing) · confidence 0.72
“ 3 Exploring the potential of edularp design to foster design thinking related skills and empowerment To investigate the potential of co-designing edularps in regard of fostering design thinking related skills and empowerment as well as to get a better understanding of the usability of co-designing edularps as an educational activity concerning CS, a combination of studies has been carried out in formal education settings from October 2024 to June 2025 in Aus”
departure from common sense · Abstract/Introduction framing · confidence 0.55
“ We are going to briefly describe three of the edularps to illustrate the vast range of creative ideas concerning learning goals, settings, storylines, playstyles and game mechanics and to also demonstrate that people without prior knowledge about design-thinking can produce playable edularps in a short time: In “Solo Fighters” (see Figure 5 ) a group of people gets stranded on a remote island that seems to be under the control of some evil mastermind”
limitation · Limitations and future research · confidence 0.86
“3 Limitations and future research The major limitation of our study is that – while we did work in CD and PD settings – it was never outside of a formal education context, so we cannot be certain, if our findings of edularp co-design fostering creativity, collaboration, empowerment, and intrinsic motivation are transferable to other CD and PD processes.”
validation scope · Limitations and future research · confidence 0.82
Limits
Method limits
The study is explicitly limited by its setting and by its temporal scope: it was conducted only within formal education contexts and captured a snapshot rather than sustained effects. The paper also notes that it cannot establish transferability to other PD/CD processes.
Deployment limits
The approach is presented as promising for PD, CD, and educational settings, but the authors do not validate deployment outside formal education or across broader organizational contexts. Practical adoption elsewhere remains inferential rather than demonstrated.
Boundary conditions
Findings are bounded by formal education settings in Austria and by the specific combination of teacher survey, university teacher-education workshop, and high-school CSE classes. The paper itself asks whether the results transfer to other CD and PD processes.
Position in field
This work sits at the intersection of participatory design, co-design, educational technology, and design-thinking pedagogy. Its contribution is best read as a method proposal with evaluative evidence, not as a general theory or a fully validated intervention.