Collaborating on Game Design Education

2025-10-Riverfield-Visit Game Design Concepts
Riverfield students apply design-thinking to game design

This year, the Computer Simulation and Gaming (CSG) program at The University of Tulsa has partnered with Riverfield Country Day School for an exciting cross-campus collaboration in game design. Riverfield’s theme for the year, The Hero’s Journey, inspired their decision to integrate a game design project into their curriculum, giving students a creative way to explore storytelling, systems thinking, and problem-solving.

As part of the partnership, Riverfield brought 70 middle school students to the TU campus for an immersive day of learning. The students attended a Game Design Concepts lecture, explored the foundations of gameplay and narrative, and playtested the current CSG senior production game project. The visit offered a hands-on glimpse into the game production pipeline, from idea generation and prototyping to playtesting and refinement.

2025-10-Riverfield-Visit

2025-10-Riverfield-Visit

The collaboration also fostered valuable mentorship opportunities, as TU students guided the younger designers and shared insights from their own development process.

Next month, Riverfield students will return to campus to pitch their original game projects and receive feedback and advice from TU’s CSG students and faculty. Together, the partnership highlights the power of games as both a creative medium and a collaborative learning experience, inspiring the next generation of designers to begin their own hero’s journey in game creation.

Professor Akram

Akram Taghavi-Burris has over 15 years of experience teaching game development and design, along with computer graphics, animation, and web development in higher education. Akram has an M.Ed. and is currently program coordinator and instructor of Computer Simulation & Gaming (CSG) in the Tandy School of Computer Science at the University of Tulsa.

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