Metatuning: A pedagogical framework for a generative STEM education in game design-based learning

While K-12 STEM Education test scores have been steadily improving over the past decade in the United States, achievement gaps still remain among minorities and women in STEM courses and careers. There are numerous factors that contribute to these disparities, such as poverty, low status and other sociocultural factors in classrooms that impede learning. Difficulties in STEM Education engagement and encumbered participation are often due to decontextualized learning - incongruence between meaningful contexts and learning processes. Game based learning methods are common STEM Ed models that provide youth with extrinsically motivating knowledge frameworks for learning, however, research has proven that even these procedural spaces often are disconnected from students' social and cultural realities. Amidst the STEM Ed achievement gaps problematic are similar disparities found in popular video game spaces, where there is a less than 20% chance that these same disparity groups will navigate computational worlds with protagonists that look like them. These gamers/students are lacking the “under-the-hood” (STEM) knowledge of the very games they engage with on a daily basis. This contradiction is central to this paper and the conceptualization of Metatuning - a game design pedagogical framework that aims to empower students to discover their identities as agents of change, and to see that game design can nurture their internal motivations. In this case study, Metatuning was used to foster an intrinsically motivated learning environment, where a young designer was able to iteratively design a social justice themed game that empowered her as a designer and an aspiring doctor.