Case 4. Designing Hopeful Futures: Using Games to Reimagine AI's Role in Higher Education
Scope and Institutional Landscape
At Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), project-based learning (PBL) is a defining institutional commitment. Today, almost 100% of faculty engage students in PBL, in both institute-wide project offerings and individual course project work, and all undergraduates complete multiple project experiences (Wobbe et al., 2025). PBL is central to WPI’s public-facing identity and value proposition, and alumni commonly reflect that it formed the foundation of their WPI experiences.
The university’s commitment to PBL originated with the adoption of the WPI Plan in 1970 (Dorsey, 1996), a moment marked by significant social, political, and technological uncertainty. Students were demanding greater agency and flexibility and the institution faced enrollment declines and financial uncertainty as it struggled to justify the value of a private, technical education over lower cost state universities. The WPI Plan responded to these challenges by structuring the curriculum around immersive, authentic projects. It established three major project experiences: the Major Qualifying Project within the discipline; the Interactive Qualifying Project, an interdisciplinary team-based project examining the relationship between technology and society; and a capstone to the equivalent of a minor in a field of the humanities and arts.
The most recent addition to the WPI Plan was the Great Problems Seminar, created in 2007 to introduce first year students to PBL through a two-term course centered on issues of global significance. Great Problems Seminar courses are co-taught by two faculty members who bring differing perspectives from their disciplines. Over two terms, students work in interdisciplinary teams, engage in university-level research as they propose responses to complex grand challenges, and wrestle with the technical, social, and ethical dimensions of complex problems. The goal is for students to develop skills in teamwork, academic research, critical thinking, and communication that prepare them for success in WPI’s rigorous project-based curriculum and beyond (Wobbe & Stoddard, 2019).
Signature Case Study: Great Problems Seminar – Games for Hopeful AI Futures
Games for Hopeful AI Futures is a Great Problems Seminar course—co-taught between faculty from Interactive Media and Game Development and Integrative and Global Studies—that invites first-year students to examine artificial intelligence as a contested technology that stands to radically shape our future. Through the course, students investigate AI systems and how they function technologically, socially, and politically. Beyond learning how to think critically about AI, the PBL experience in this Great Problems Seminar invites students to rethink the value of higher education and their role within it in three key ways:
how they can re-envision their educational experience as one in which they learn how to co-create social change toward positive futures;
how institutes of higher education are interconnected ecosystems of students, faculty, staff, and administrators and that they have an important voice within these ecosystems; and,
how they can view their education as a site for knowledge creation through interdisciplinary collaboration, rather than an individualistic endeavor to build content knowledge in a chosen major area of study.
Games for Hopeful Futures: Curriculum Overview
The first half of the course is divided into three modules where students explore the function and impact of both design thinking and artificial intelligence in three worlds: the designed world, the social world, and the natural world. We created this structure for students to explore AI, develop their own stances on AI, and build greater awareness of available topics to focus on during their B term project. Students take time each week to journal about what they are learning and how it is changing or shaping their understanding of AI and design elements. Topics include:
The Designed World: how humans shape technology and how technologies shape us, such as design affordances, how AI works technically, and common misconceptions about AI that arise from psychological effects (e.g., the Eliza Effect; Wardrip-Fruin, 2009)
The Social World: how technology impacts social relationships, how AI erodes trust in relationships at all scales from interpersonal to institutional, how game systems can support positive and pro-social relationships
The Natural World: the hidden environmental and human costs of AI technologies, efforts to achieve climate-conscious design, and social and environmental responsibilities in game design
At the end of this initial exploration, we pose a Big Question to the students: “What should be the role of AI in higher education?” We ask students to answer this question through a game they create in interdisciplinary teams during the second half of the course; they then present this game for others to play university-wide at the end of the semester. The game needs to reflect not only their stance on artificial intelligence, but also their hopes for the future of WPI and the role AI should play within that future.
Envisioning Hopeful Futures through Design and Play
It is common for PBL, especially in STEM contexts, to focus on a problem-solving mentality. Yet for our students to be able to operate within and begin to address the intersectional polycrisis facing the world writ large, we need a more holistic approach than solving individual problems in isolation. This holistic approach requires us to be able to identify positive futures to build toward. A shared sense of a hopeful and positive future provides a unifying vision for necessarily distributed actions that create change; it also provides motivation to continue trying to effect change. PBL can prepare students for this by helping them identify potential positive futures and how to work together to achieve them.
Using games and game development as a vehicle for collaboration and communication, we bring a playful and hopeful tone to the course. Playing and learning together introduces a kind of vulnerability and camaraderie that allows students to become more open to sharing ideas and envisioning how these ideas can shape the future (DeKoven & Gramazio, 2020). This philosophy infuses our approach to mentoring students in their project work, from initial concept development to final presentation.
Playful design methods
We collaboratively create dice tables to prompt new kinds of game ideas. Dice tables are a structured yet random way to spur creative thinking. Each number on the die corresponds to an attribute and the die is rolled multiple times to randomly select the attributes around which to ideate. This also mirrors the idea of using generative systems to prompt, rather than replace, human brainstorming, demonstrating alternative means of engaging with AI.
Futures-oriented pitch process
We ask each student to develop one of the ideas from the dice table into a short pitch for a potential game and present it to the full class as part of a shared celebration of student ideas. Through this process, students are able to see not only the kinds of games they could work on, but also gain an appreciation for the rich variety of imagined futures from their peers.
Selecting projects as a community
Students, faculty, and Peer Learning Assistants work together to greenlight eight ideas for further development. In the voting process, we inform students that not every idea can move forward. Students are asked to cast their votes for the ideas that excite them and that they would want to work on should their pitch not move forward to the next phase of the class. We use this information to curate a collection of projects that best represents the visions of the students while also ensuring projects can be scoped appropriately for the timeframe.
Student Agency in Higher Education as an Interconnected Ecosystem
The focus of this course was influenced by our participation in university-level conversations about the value of higher education in the age of AI. While many voices across campus were part of these conversations—administrators, board members, faculty members, IT staff, instructional designers, and experts in AI and pedagogy—a major missing voice was students. Amidst this absence, students’ motives around AI usage were often called into question. Our goal in this course was thus to find avenues to bring student voices directly into the conversation and we designed our Great Problems Seminar as an environment where faculty and students join a learning community together with project work that would be publicly disseminated. We did this in a few ways.
Modeling agency through course policy co-creation
To model how student voices can have impact on university policies, we build our course AI policy collaboratively. After exploring how generative AI works and discussing the benefits and harms of the overuse of AI, we ask students to work in small groups to consider various AI use cases, such as using AI to identify source materials, write an essay, or generate artwork for a PowerPoint presentation. As a class, we attempt to determine where the line between AI assistance and complete delegation lies in relation to the course learning outcomes. As instructors, we were surprised to learn that some of the students had even more restrictive perspectives on AI use than we did. This was contrary to the narrative we were hearing in the larger campus AI conversation. Through this activity, students are invited to form their own stance on AI use and to connect that stance to their own learning behaviors in an actual course context.
Supporting student voices in university events
Throughout the course, we prepare students to join the broader university-wide conversation and share their hopeful AI futures with the WPI community at Poster Day, treating each class activity as scaffolding toward their final presentation. In addition to Poster Day, students participate in AlphaFest, an annual event held by the Interactive Media and Game Development Program for game designers at WPI to test their projects and get feedback from a wide audience. WPI’s Global School also hosted a Forum on Project-Based Learning in the Age of AI in Spring 2026 and three teams from the Fall 2025 class were selected to share their project and their messages about AI in higher education.
Developing a professional identity outside the university
A final component of the course is to share their final games on itch.io[1], a website for independent digital creators to disseminate indie games, game assets, and tabletop games. Through these presentation avenues, students are able to begin practicing how they present themselves professionally as they contribute to the broader university-wide conversation about the role of AI in higher education.
Knowledge Creation through Interdisciplinary Collaboration
PBL naturally supports interdisciplinary knowledge formation through its focus on team-based, collaborative, authentic, and high-impact project work. By introducing students to PBL in the first year, we are also introducing them to an interdisciplinary model of learning: one in which students are positioned as members of a community who seek to learn effective processes for knowledge creation, rather than as individual recipients of content knowledge in a particular field. In our Great Problems Seminar, we treat students as interdisciplinary teams of knowledge creators.
Games development as interdisciplinary collaboration
By creating games, students learn how to work together in collaborative, mixed-skill teams. To create a game that is ready for the public to play, students must manage the complex interplay of design, technology, art, writing, and production methods. We invite students to select their role in the project, and even their project itself, based on both their excitement for the subject matter and the skills they want to develop through project work.
Refining knowledge through game creation
Creating games requires students to learn about the subject matter of the game as they create it and to continually iterate upon their ideas as they come into focus through the development process (Kafai & Burke, 2015). In our Great Problems Seminar, we have students focus on how the systems they are creating in the game convey a message to players. They then are able to see at presentation day how this message is interpreted and resonates differently based on the audience.
Establishing a supportive mentorship network
Peer Learning Assistants (upper-level students with experience in PBL courses) support the inevitable challenges that arise in team projects, including communication, conflict, and team decision-making. Through this peer-to-peer learning model, the Great Problems Seminars function as a microcosm of the larger WPI experience, providing first-year students with a safe, supportive space to try new ways of thinking and learning. With mentorship from Peer Learning Assistants, students learn to operate in ambiguity, build resilience and adaptability, and leave the experience better prepared for success at WPI and with foundational skills for a stronger society.
Infrastructure: Co-Teaching Builds Community
Great Problems Seminar courses are co-taught by faculty from different departments. Co-teaching models interdisciplinary collaboration and communication and prepares students with hybrid technical and professional skills. Co-teachers may each be able to shape student understanding of their work in different ways and even contradict each other in advice! For example, during presentation practice, it is not unusual for us to give contradictory feedback and then ask the students to decide what the best path forward is for themselves. Co-teaching makes clearer that education happens in communities and communities are complex as a feature, not a bug.
Co-teaching models can be challenging in higher education, especially in resource-constrained environments where departments and programs need their faculty to focus on meeting credit delivery needs within the major. Two critical elements at WPI that make this possible are a) the existing PBL infrastructure that makes collaboration across the institution a norm, and b) the ability to use each individual Great Problems Seminars to meet specific course and degree requirements. For this Great Problems Seminar, one of the instructors was already in the academic unit that offers these courses. The other was able to join teaching the course because it was possible to have it count for an Interactive Media and Game Development course requirement. Because this course counts as a social implications requirement for multiple degrees on campus, it was then an attractive course option for first year students.
However, far beyond course requirements, the co-teaching model has brought immeasurable value back to the Interactive Media and Game Development Program as an academic unit. It has built a lasting collaborative relationship that has led to further integration of community-based project learning elsewhere in the curriculum. It has helped students and faculty from across the institution better understand what the Interactive Media and Game Development program has to offer to the institution. It has also reached students that the program would not typically reach (resulting in some additional majors and minors), and has both reshaped and refreshed the existing curriculum by introducing new ideas and project options for our students. All of these have strengthened our ability to market this program’s value proposition as part of broader WPI recruitment campaigns.
Conclusion
More than fifty years after the adoption of the WPI plan, we are once again educating students amid political instability, rapid technological change, uncertainty about the future, and skepticism about the role and value of higher education. As was the case in 1970, the value of education is less about mastering discipline-specific content and more about learning to navigate complexity, question assumptions, adapt amid uncertainty, and act responsibly. PBL is more relevant than ever because it challenges students to embrace uncertainty as a site for learning, to work in multidisciplinary teams toward shared values, and to act within their communities to achieve their hopes for the future. Helping them understand how their higher education creates pathways for that future is possible from within the institution when we get creative about how we respond to this need.
References
DeKoven, B., & Gramazio, H. (2020). Infinite playground : a player’s guide to imagination. MIT Press.
Dorsey, M. (1996). A Miracle at Worcester: The Story of The WPI Plan (Part 1) [Review of A Miracle at Worcester: The Story of The WPI Plan (Part 1)]. WPI Journal, 5–15. https://www.wpi.edu/sites/default/files/2019/miracle_at_worcester.pdf
Kafai, Y. B., & Burke, Q. (2015). Constructionist Gaming: Understanding the Benefits of Making Games for Learning. Educational Psychologist, 50(4), 313–334. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2015.1124022
Wardrip-Fruin, N. (2009). Expressive processing: Digital fictions, computer games, and software studies. MIT Press.
Wobbe, K., LeChasseur, K., Demetry, C., Heinricher, A., & Vaz, R. (2025). Worcester Polytechnic Institute: Project Based Education. In E. Balleisen, S. G. Engel, L. Howe & M. O’Neil (Eds.), Collaborative, Project-Based Learning in Higher Education: Case Studies (pp. 41-47). Duke University. https://ctl.duke.edu/collaborative-project-case-studies/
Wobbe, K., & Stoddard, E. A. (2019). Project-Based Learning in the First Year : Beyond All Expectations. (1st ed.). Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003446491
[1] Student games from the 2025 offering of the course are archived here: