Data education in schools

Amid growing efforts to embed data literacy in the Scottish school curriculum, the Data Education Live Lessons (DELL) initiative set out to create engaging, interactive lessons that would reach learners across both formal and informal education settings. But in a field still dominated by didactic instruction and limited screen interaction, a central challenge emerged: how do you sustain learner motivation and emotional engagement with complex, abstract data concepts?

Commissioned by the University of Edinburgh, this project offered a chance to reimagine DELL through the lens of serious game design. Drawing on theory and best practice from gamification and educational games, I conducted a comprehensive design review of the existing lessons, analysed their alignment with player-motivation frameworks, and produced over 60 actionable recommendations for enhancing engagement.

The result was a deep exploration of how challenge, narrative, character design, social interaction, and reward systems could be more meaningfully embedded into the DELL platform — without compromising educational integrity. My work gave the team a flexible, theory-driven design toolkit for future development, grounded in frameworks such as Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the MDA model (Mechanics–Dynamics–Aesthetics), and PENS (Player Experience of Need Satisfaction).

Beyond advising on game mechanics, I also evaluated the project's broader positioning — exploring the affordances of live streaming, character-driven narratives, and asynchronous play for reaching diverse learner groups across Scotland. The recommendations have helped shape a more coherent, sustainable, and motivational vision for the DELL programme going forward.

Process overview

This consultancy was driven by a need to rethink how data literacy lessons could emotionally and cognitively engage young learners across varied learning environments. Rather than beginning with surface-level gamification tactics, I focused on deeply analysing the structural and motivational design of the lessons already in use.

My process began with a close reading of two live lessons, mapping their content and delivery patterns against player-motivation frameworks from the games and learning literature. From there I developed a tailored critique that looked beyond individual moments — focusing instead on broader systems of engagement, including pacing, autonomy, narrative framing, social interaction, and feedback mechanics.

By blending theory with pragmatic insight, I was able to move from diagnostic work to strategic ideation — producing a set of forward-looking recommendations that not only addressed current design gaps but also opened up new directions for lesson structuring, platform evolution, and audience reach. The process was iterative, consultative, and grounded in real-world constraints, ensuring my outputs were both creatively ambitious and practically actionable.

1 · Design Audit & Heuristic Review

The process began with a close analysis of two existing Data Education Live Lessons: Data Selfie and Unflattening Data. I broke each lesson down into its core components — narrative framing, activity flow, interaction points, pacing, and feedback mechanisms. This let me examine not just what content was delivered, but how learners were positioned in relation to it: as passive recipients, active participants, or something in between.

I applied a structured heuristic lens drawn from established game design models, including the MDA framework, PENS, and Self-Determination Theory. Each lesson was reviewed against criteria such as:

• Clarity and consistency of the learner role — is it obvious who the learner is meant to be and what they are doing?
• Presence of meaningful choice and consequence — do decisions matter and shape the experience?
• Opportunities for challenge, mastery, and feedback — can learners build and demonstrate competence?
• Emotional tone and narrative coherence — does the framing hold together and resonate?
• Social presence and interaction design — how are other learners and facilitators made felt?

This audit surfaced mismatches between intended learning goals and the actual learner experience — for instance, activities that required complex input but offered little payoff, or moments where autonomy was constrained by unclear framing. These insights formed the baseline for the motivational and design critique that followed.

2 · Motivation Mapping & Framework Application

Building on the audit findings, I conducted a detailed mapping of each lesson against learner-motivation frameworks, focusing on how design choices supported or hindered engagement. Central to this was the application of Self-Determination Theory and the PENS model — tools that assess how well a system supports users' needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

For each lesson, I analysed:

• Where learners were given meaningful choices — or not.
• How clearly goals and feedback aligned with a sense of mastery.
• Whether characters or tasks fostered emotional connection, or felt distant and abstract.
• The degree to which social presence was supported, both live and asynchronously.

This phase allowed me to identify not just moments of friction or underuse, but also untapped motivational potential — areas where small shifts in framing, structure, or characterisation could produce significantly more engaging experiences.

I also considered where the live format created unique opportunities — such as anticipation, presence, or communal play — and where it imposed limitations, particularly for learners accessing the content after the fact. These observations informed the next stage: developing a set of focused, actionable recommendations.

3 · Design Recommendations & Scenario Planning

Drawing from the audit and motivation analysis, I developed a set of over 60 actionable recommendations — ranging from low-effort enhancements to more structural redesigns. Each recommendation was grounded in theory but oriented toward practical implementation, aligned with the technical and pedagogical constraints of the programme. Key areas of focus included:

• Narrative framing — rewriting lesson intros to centre the learner and establish a sense of purpose and stakes.
• Character design — introducing mentor or peer figures to scaffold tasks and provide emotional anchors.
• Challenge structuring — breaking complex tasks into nested layers of difficulty, with clearer feedback and pacing.
• Social interaction — designing both live and asynchronous opportunities for peer input, reflection, and co-creation.
• Reward & feedback systems — moving beyond correct/incorrect responses to more expressive, motivational forms of feedback.

Alongside the recommendations, I created a set of future-facing design scenarios that illustrated how the lessons could evolve — differentiating between synchronous and asynchronous modes while preserving core educational goals. These scenarios helped the team visualise what meaningful change could look like across different user contexts, from classroom use to home-based learning.

4 · Strategic Foresight & Evaluation Planning

Beyond design recommendations, my consultancy also addressed the long-term trajectory of the DELL programme — exploring how the lessons could evolve to better support diverse learning environments, shifting attention from one-off broadcasts to a sustainable, mixed-format experience model.

I proposed a clear separation of synchronous and asynchronous user journeys, recommending distinct structural and motivational strategies for each:

1. For synchronous learners, I emphasised real-time social presence, anticipation, and co-located challenge — leaning into what only a live, shared moment can offer.
2. For asynchronous learners, I focused on replayability, branching paths, and rich feedback loops that supported self-directed exploration after the broadcast had ended.

To support the team's ability to track and refine these approaches, I developed a multi-dimensional evaluation framework combining:

• Affective engagement metrics — enjoyment, interest, and perceived challenge.
• Behavioural indicators — drop-off points, replay behaviour, and interaction types.
• Cognitive outcomes — knowledge gains, concept recall, and transferability.

This planning positioned the team to move beyond simple analytics toward a meaningful understanding of learner experience — supporting iteration and evidence-based growth.

Outcomes

Reflections

This project reinforced a conviction at the heart of my practice: that motivation is a design material in its own right, not a layer of points and badges bolted on at the end. By treating Self-Determination Theory and player-experience frameworks as diagnostic lenses rather than decorative ones, the work moved past surface gamification toward the structural questions that actually shape how learners feel — who they are in the lesson, what their choices mean, and whether anyone is there with them.

It also clarified how different the demands of live and on-demand learning really are. The energy of a synchronous broadcast — its anticipation and shared presence — cannot simply be recorded and replayed; asynchronous experiences need their own motivational architecture built around exploration and feedback. Holding both in view, and giving the team a flexible toolkit rather than a fixed prescription, was the most valuable thing I could leave behind: a way of thinking that can keep guiding the DELL programme as it grows.