Conference Program

This paper presents an innovative Teacher Professional Development (TPD) program that integrates Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) board games and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) to cultivate complexity awareness, emotional intelligence, and democratic agency in secondary STEM education. In a global context marked by democratic backsliding, widening inequalities, and accelerated digital transformation, citizenship education increasingly requires the capacity to interpret technoscientific systems, negotiate uncertainty, and regulate emotions in situations characterized by risk, ambiguity, and competing values. We argue that learning for democracy cannot be reduced to content transmission or abstract civic principles: it must be enacted through participatory practices in which learners experience and reflect upon decision-making, responsibility, and the social consequences of models.

Our program was designed within the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei project and aligned with the Lombardy guidelines L’Arte di Imparare, which emphasize a shift from the teacher as lecturer to the teacher as designer of learning environments. COTS board games are conceptualized as accessible “complex systems” that embody feedback loops, resource conflicts, probabilistic events, and ethical dilemmas—conditions that mirror contemporary civic life shaped by datafication and algorithmic governance. Unlike many instructional games, COTS games generate authentic emotional dynamics (tension, frustration, solidarity, hope, fear of failure) that can be pedagogically leveraged to foster resilience and reflective judgment rather than performance anxiety and withdrawal.

The study reports a pilot implementation conducted with a volunteer sample of secondary STEM teachers in Northern Sardinia, Italy, within a 12-week hybrid course combining workshops, online meetings, collaborative game analysis, classroom prototyping, and guided reflection. Teachers engaged in iterative design cycles: selecting games, deconstructing mechanics through the MDA framework, planning learning sequences, and incorporating student co-design to support epistemic agency. A mixed-methods evaluation included the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES) and the Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ), complemented by open-ended reflections. Preliminary results indicate increased teacher confidence in designing engagement-oriented activities, strong immersion and perceived competence during gameplay, and a growing professional identity centered on facilitation, mediation, and ethical responsibility.

Two case studies illustrate how the approach operationalizes democratic citizenship education through technoscientific literacy and emotional empowerment. Maxwell’s Daemons supports probabilistic reasoning, network thinking, and model-based explanation within playful competition; Forgotten Odyssey: The Damned of Asinara situates resource optimization and risk management within historically grounded ethical choices and collective responsibility. Across both cases, generative AI functioned as an emotional–cognitive mediator: a dialogic partner for scenario expansion, reflective feedback, personalization, and metacognitive prompts that helped teachers (and potentially students) articulate assumptions, monitor emotional states, and evaluate AI outputs critically rather than accept them as authoritative.

Overall, the paper contributes a replicable framework showing how the convergence of board game design, emotional intelligence, and AI-supported reflection can counter technocratic reductionism and support democratic learning as a lived, relational practice—preparing educators and students to inhabit complex systems with greater clarity, care, and civic responsibility.

In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and rapid technological transformation, education must prepare students not only to use digital tools, but also to critically understand and evaluate the technoscientific systems that structure contemporary life. The ubiquity of AI—especially among younger generations—raises urgent pedagogical questions: how can schools integrate these technologies without reinforcing passive consumption, dependency on automated outputs, or technocratic reductionism? How can AI instead strengthen democratic agency and responsible participation, rather than functioning as an efficiency device that short-circuits critical thinking?

Building on its educational proposal, this contribution outlines a co-design framework integrating generative AI, playful learning, and reverse thinking to foster critical AI literacy, creativity, and civic empowerment. Reverse thinking operates as a methodological lever that challenges the expectation that technology should primarily deliver fast, correct answers. In this approach, AI is repositioned as a dialogic partner that supports inquiry, encourages hypothesis-making, and generates productive uncertainty. The aim is to cultivate learners who can question AI outputs, identify assumptions, compare perspectives, and negotiate meaning—competences essential for navigating AI-saturated environments and for engaging in democratic debates about technology and governance.

The project translates conventional curricular topics into interactive game-based experiences. Teachers and students collaboratively transform disciplinary content into logic-based challenges, narrative scenarios, or rule-driven problems, while AI supports ideation, iteration, and critical testing. Prompt engineering becomes not merely technical training but a reflective practice: learners learn to formulate better questions, explore system behavior, test alternative framings, and validate claims. Teachers, in turn, act as designers, facilitators, and “game masters,” guiding exploratory pathways where progress depends on reasoning, collaboration, and informed decision-making rather than on receiving immediate solutions.

Crucially, the framework situates learning within emotionally meaningful experiences. Complex systems—technological, ecological, economic, or social—are often perceived as unstable and difficult to control, potentially triggering anxiety, stress, and disengagement, particularly in performance-oriented school cultures. AI-mediated playful learning offers protected environments where uncertainty, error, negotiation, and redesign are normalized. Through gameplay, learners experience tension, curiosity, surprise, and satisfaction in manageable forms, gradually developing emotional regulation and resilience. Mistakes become generative moments that spark exploration rather than fear; complexity becomes a space for collective problem-solving rather than a source of toxic stress. Positive emotions thus function as a pedagogical infrastructure supporting deep learning, sustained attention, and persistence in challenging tasks.

Play becomes a laboratory for navigating complexity, where technological awareness grows alongside metacognition, ethical reflection, and collective responsibility. By designing and discussing rules, evaluating AI-generated options, and reflecting on consequences, students practice civic reasoning and learn that technoscientific systems are not neutral but shaped by values, trade-offs, and power relations. Used critically, generative AI can help surface these dimensions by offering alternative perspectives, simulating outcomes, and prompting discussion about bias, reliability, and accountability.

Overall, the proposal contributes to debates on science, technology, and democracy by showing how AI-supported playful learning can cultivate not only digital competence, but also ethical awareness, epistemic empowerment, and the capacity to inhabit contemporary complex systems with agency and well-being.

Educating for democratic citizenship has never been a simple matter, and the task grows more pressing in contexts marked by systemic instability, increasing complexity, and the pervasiveness of techno-scientific reasoning. Cognitive skills, while necessary, are not sufficient on their own. Learners also require socio-relational competencies and practical strategies for regulating emotions. Neuropsychological research consistently shows that facilitative emotional conditions support deep cognitive processing, while sustained anxiety and tension tend to foster withdrawal, rigidity, and diminished critical engagement (Deci et al., 2001). A credible approach to citizenship education must therefore address cognitive and affective dimensions in tandem.

This contribution explores the educational potential of two instruments that are receiving growing attention in both research and practice: tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). TTRPGs create experiential learning environments built on collaborative narrative and shared decision-making (Zagal & Deterding, 2018). Within a low-stakes fictional frame, participants encounter situations involving uncertainty, competing interests, and ethical tension, allowing space for reflection and revision without the consequences of real-world failure (Barone, 1997). In doing so, gameplay engages components of emotional intelligence that conventional instructional formats seldom reach.

Existing literature suggests that these practices can foster competencies aligned with the European LifeComp framework (European Commission, 2020). Shared narrative construction calls for perspective-taking and active regulation of group dynamics. The distribution of agency within the game demands mediation, attentive listening, and the negotiation of collective decisions. Rotating roles across sessions encourages situated leadership and relational coordination. The ADVENTURE framework (Capobianco & Manganello, 2025) gives operational form to these principles through a five-phase methodology that integrates Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan) with LifeComp competencies. At its core lies the Adventurer’s Diary, a formative assessment tool structured around the psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

GenAI, in turn, can function as a complementary instrument for cognitive and emotional mediation. Following a three-dimensional model (Masi, Boccuzzi & Manganello, 2025; Masi et al., 2026), GenAI may operate as a design partner, supporting educators in developing culturally inclusive scenarios through iterative elaboration; as a critical friend, providing adaptive feedback informed by diverse cultural frameworks and calibrated to individual communicative styles; and as a work participant, moderating cross-cultural exchanges and prompting metacognitive reflection on strategies, emotional responses, and the consequences of in-game choices. Understood in this way, GenAI does not serve as a control mechanism or evaluative authority. It operates instead as a scaffold for cognitive well-being, with the potential to reduce performance-related anxiety and strengthen learners’ sense of self-efficacy.

This paper argues that combining structured game-based practices with generative artificial intelligence may open space for educational ecosystems that resist reductionist accounts of techno-science and extend learners’ capacity to engage critically with complex contemporary systems. Resilience, self-awareness, and democratic agency are not incidental by-products of such approaches but rather what this kind of pedagogy, at least in principle, is meant to cultivate. The paper further discusses conditions for effective implementation across educational levels, questions of equity and agency in the joint use of games and digital tools, and directions for future empirical research.

This paper presents the validation of a dialogue-based game mechanic designed to address complex social topics, specifically inclusivity and gender-based violence, through a psychology-informed approach to procedural rhetoric in adolescent game-based learning. Rather than assuming that “good dialogues” and well-intentioned design are sufficient, the proposed mechanic explicitly tests the psychological reality of its procedural message by empirically calibrating how players perceive different dialogue options along a bipolar recognition-of-harm scale (in Italian, from “sminuire” to “aggravare”, or Sm.Ag.).

The case study is Un giorno come un altro (designed and developed by Drimlab), a narrative videogame for lower and upper secondary school students that uses branching dialogues in which each decision node offers two alternatives differing in how they recognise and frame a problematic situation (e.g., dismissive “What’s the big deal?” versus acknowledging “This is really serious”). Each choice is intended to position the player on a bipolar recognition-of-harm scale, ranging from minimising to exacerbating the perceived seriousness of the issue, thereby shaping both in-game outcomes and the player’s sense of agency over how the situation is interpreted. To ground this procedural rhetoric in players’ actual perceptions, every dialogue line is independently rated by psychologists and psychology students on a Likert-type recognition-of-harm dimension (minimising vs exacerbating), after reading the dialogue sequence up to that point. The Sm.Ag. value associated with each option corresponds to the mean perceived position on this bipolar scale, and the game’s scoring system as well as its three possible endings (Sm‑dominated, Ag‑dominated, or balanced trajectories) directly reflect these empirically derived evaluations rather than the designers’ a priori intentions.

The proposed validation procedure is situated at the intersection of work on the psychological reality of procedural rhetoric (Anderson, Karzmark, & Wardrip-Fruin, 2019), philosophical and empirical accounts of agency in games (Nguyen, 2020), and a unifying framework for the psychology of games that conceptualises games as structured psychological systems (Mattiassi, 2026). It also builds on research on games as media for social change and on gender stereotypes and representation in games (Flanagan & Kaufman, 2018). By aligning the micro-structure of branching dialogues with empirically validated recognition-of-harm trajectories, this approach aims to ensure that the game’s procedural rhetoric about inclusivity and gender-based violence is both psychologically plausible and educationally meaningful. The contribution is twofold: it offers a concrete method for validating the rhetoric of dialogue-heavy serious games on complex topics related to civic engagement (Rivers & Bertoli, 2024), and it suggests that addressing such topics in democratic citizenship education requires empirically testing not only content and outcomes (Bertolo & Mariani, 2019; Plass, 2015), but also the procedural patterns through which players exercise and experience agency.

Research on serious games for civic and citizenship education has often focused on their potential to convey civic content, simulate political processes, or increase engagement with public issues. Their educational contribution, however, remains contested, partly because games are frequently treated as self-contained interventions and evaluated through short-term, in-game measures (Dishon & Kafai, 2022). This paper argues that what makes serious games educationally significant for democracy might not lie in the civic content they carry but in the quality of the encounters they stage: spaces in which learners not only encounter other viewpoints but are also challenged to move beyond them (Blokland et al., 2024; Gutierrez et al., 2014), and experiment with ways of reasoning and acting within complex civic systems rather than merely learning about them (de la Torre et al., 2021). From this perspective, serious games are read as designed environments for navigating democratic complexity, understood as the interdependence, non‑linearity, and uncertainty that characterize civil life, rather than as discrete tools for delivering predefined civic messages.

Central to this argument is a relational and emotionally grounded view of perspective-taking. Taking another's standpoint is not simply a cognitive exercise performed at a distance; it is shaped by the affective experience of role-play, by peer interaction, and by the discomfort of inhabiting a position one would not otherwise choose or be able to occupy (Gutierrez et al., 2014; Blokland et al., 2024). Emotion is therefore not incidental but constitutive: it pushes learners into a zone of proximal development for democratic reasoning, making alternative positions something they must reckon with, not simply register, and opens space to test possible ways of seeing and acting within complex civic situations. This is also why serious games are especially well-suited to democratic education: they can stage ambiguity and conflicting values without prematurely resolving them, holding open the dissonance that civic life requires learners to navigate (Blokland et al., 2024).

This potential, however, is conditional. What happens during play matters, but so does what surrounds it. Without structured debriefing sessions, contextual embedding, and facilitated dialogue, gameplay may remain affectively intense but educationally limited (Blokland et al., 2024; Dishon & Kafai, 2022). From this perspective, this paper considers AI‑supported systems not as substitutes for facilitation, but as tools for scaffolding reflection after play. It explores whether AI‑mediated debriefing might help learners articulate, connect, and reflect on the multiple perspectives encountered in the game, while preserving space for open‑ended dialogue and critical interrogation of the norms and assumptions at stake (Wegemer et al., 2025).

Rather than asking whether serious games "work" for democratic citizenship education in general, the paper asks under what conditions they may help learners navigate democratic complexity in ways that are emotionally engaged, reflectively informed, and open to genuine civic dialogue. It thus offers a cautious and educationally grounded interpretation of serious games as designed and facilitated environments whose democratic value depends on the quality of the emotional and reflective experiences they make possible, and that may be further supported and augmented by AI-mediated dialogue.

In the contemporary context, education is undergoing a technoscientific transformation that tends to replace slow, situated, and relational practices with models of educational governance linked to datafication, EdTech, and the pervasive diffusion of AI. In this scenario, the digital ecosystem is increasingly opaque: students and citizens struggle to understand the consequences of their actions, profiling mechanisms, dark patterns, and the logic of an "algorithmic governmentality" that transcends the individual. This acute technosocial opacity is not only a cognitive problem, but also an emotional one: uncertainty and the perception of lack of control can produce anxiety, frustration, and withdrawal, hindering deep learning and critical participation. The paper proposes to view this condition as a central challenge for education for democratic citizenship: inhabiting complex systems requires simultaneously critical technoscientific skills and emotional tools to support exploration, deliberation, and conflict without falling into toxic stress or adaptive docility. Within this framework, COTS board games are considered "accessible complexity simulators" capable of safely and reflectively experiencing systemic dynamics such as risk, resource scarcity, feedback loops, cooperation/competition, ethical dilemmas, and trade-offs. Board games, in their "slow" and situated dimension, can become an educational ecosystem that activates ludoliteracy and complex thinking, as well as components of emotional intelligence (affective state recognition, regulation, tension management, tolerance of uncertainty), transforming errors into opportunities for redesign and complexity into resilience and hope, rather than a cognitive block. Finally, the paper explores the role of generative AI in game-based educational programs within the tensions that characterize current algorithmic ecosystems. In a context marked by technosocial opacity, optimization logics, and persuasive design practices, AI is not considered a neutral tool or a pedagogical solution. In this context, AI can be tested as a problematic conversational space, rather than as an epistemic authority: a tool for interrogating decision-making processes and emotional states that emerge in contexts of uncertainty. The integration of analog play — understood as a slow practice that makes the dynamics of complex systems observable — and a limited, reflexive use of AI thus opens up an ambivalent pedagogical space, in which technology does not resolve the opacity of algorithmic systems but can contribute to making them the object of technoscientific critical interrogation.

This paper presents some results from the “Sociogamers project”, developed at the University of Turin starting in 2024, which integrates game design into social sciences curricula to foster a critical understanding of sociotechnical systems and promote forms of critical digital citizenship (Barsotti et. al., 2025; Repetto & Tirocchi, 2025). In particular, the paper focuses on the interactions between gamification and recent developments in artificial intelligence, drawing on the perspectives and experiences of the students involved in the project and reflecting on how educational practices can support critical engagement with contemporary digital platforms and data-driven environments.

The project adopts a Design Thinking approach and a peer-to-peer learning model in which students from the courses Game Based Learning and Sociology of Education (starting from a learning needs assessment of the “Network Society” course) collaboratively design immersive educational games using the Delightex Edu platform (Gros, 2007; Asad et al., 2021; Alrehaili, & Al Osman, 2022; Di Natale et al., 2020).

This approach resonates with research on digital media making that emphasises the importance of enabling young people to become active creators rather than passive consumers of digital content (McGillivray et al., 2016).

Within the project students developed a series of educational games, “sociogames”, each focused on specific sociological concepts and social processes including social capital, group segregation, descriptive social norms, among others. By translating theoretical concepts into interactive scenarios students simulate social dynamics dilemmas and decision-making processes typical of complex social systems fostering experiential learning and critical reflection while engaging in practices of digital making and collaborative problem-solving.

The study is based on a questionnaire administered to 78 university students who participated in the game design activity. The sample consists of students enrolled in the Game Based Learning course with a smaller group from Sociology of Education. The analysis combines descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis of open-ended responses to explore students’ perceptions of the learning experience and the competencies developed through the co-creation process.

Preliminary findings highlight the collaborative and creative dimensions of game design as key drivers of engagement and learning. Students particularly emphasize teamwork brainstorming and the opportunity to translate sociological concepts into interactive scenarios. The competencies most frequently reported include collaboration, problem solving, creativity, digital skills and instructional design abilities (Marin-Zapata et al., 2022; Kopolovich, 2020).

A relevant dimension emerging from the analysis concerns the development of digital and AI-related competencies. 31 responses out of 78 include references to artificial intelligence programming or digital tools used for game development while 6 students explicitly mention AI or similar technologies among the competencies acquired. Overall approximately 40% of participants associate the project with the development of digital and AI-related skills including the use of immersive software such as Delightex basic programming logic and the translation of theoretical concepts into interactive digital models.

Future research could further investigate how artificial intelligence might be integrated into gamified learning environments to generate adaptive scenarios, personalised feedback and dynamic game mechanics responding to learners’ profiles motivations and interactions within digital platforms (Abbes, Bennani, & Maalel, 2024).