Game Design Could Transform Assessment in the AI Era

What if students didn't simply complete an assessment—but designed an experience for someone else?

In this episode of Shifting Schools, Tricia Friedman pitches Jeff Utecht a new approach to assessment for the AI era: invite students to become game designers.

Games are memorable, social, challenging, and full of consequential choices. Designing one asks students to think about systems, understand an audience, establish meaningful constraints, gather feedback, solve problems, and defend the decisions they make. Those may be precisely the capabilities that matter most when AI can help produce a polished final product.

Tricia introduces the GAMES learning-design framework:

• Goal: What should players understand, practise, or accomplish?
• Audience: Who is the game being designed for?
• Mechanics: What rules, choices, and constraints make it work?
• Engagement: When do players experience agency, challenge, or frustration?
• Show It: How did testing and revision improve the game?

Check it out: https://shifting-schools-games.netlify.app/

Jeff and Tricia also explore how teachers and students can intentionally decide where AI belongs in the design process—and where the thinking should remain entirely human.

Along the way, they discuss centaur chess, systems thinking, authentic audiences, collaborative games, playtesting, vibe coding, and why assessment should increasingly examine a learner's judgment and reasoning rather than only the finished product.

You'll also hear about Bark Park, Tricia's AI-assisted dog-park simulator, where limited budgets, overflowing bins, rainy weather, unhappy visitors, and a neighbouring pickleball court turn one small public space into a surprisingly complex systems challenge.

In this episode:

• Why games often remain in our memories longer than individual lessons
• How game design develops systems thinking and executive function
• Why creating for a real audience builds empathy
• How playtesting makes feedback, failure, and revision feel natural
• What human-only and AI-supported stages might look like
• Why students need to explain and defend their design choices
• How AI can expand what students are capable of creating
• Why play may bring greater joy and meaning to assessment

Explore the GAMES framework, student design kit, research, standards connections, printable resources, and Bark Park through the links accompanying this episode.

We would love your feedback. Could this approach work in your classroom, course, or curriculum? Better yet, send us the unit you believe could never become a game. We would love to test the framework at its edges.

Thank you to our show sponsor: Unfurl

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Connect with us:

Tricia Friedman: tricia@shiftingschools.com

General inquiries: info@shiftingschools.com