Students as Partners in Designing Educational Games for Sustainability: A Case Study from a Higher Education Institution in Pakistan

As sustainability challenges grow more urgent and complex, there is increasing recognition of the need for pedagogical approaches that go beyond content delivery to foster systems thinking, ethical reasoning, and learner agency. This chapter presents a design-based study situated within a teacher education programme in Pakistan, which explored how game-based learning (GBL) could be used to introduce sustainability concepts in school settings. Drawing on a Students as Partners (SaP) framework, the project engaged student-teachers in the co-design of board and card games addressing climate change and air pollution, two issues of acute local relevance. Over a 20-h workshop, participants moved from initial misconceptions about games as merely entertaining tools toward a more sophisticated understanding of their pedagogical architecture. The iterative design process became a space for critical reflection, as students negotiated the tensions between play and learning, engagement and cognitive depth, and realism and abstraction. The findings highlight the value of design as a form of pedagogical reasoning, particularly in resource-constrained contexts where teachers are seldom positioned as curriculum designers. Rather than claiming impact on end-user learning, the chapter focuses on the professional learning of student-teachers, offering insights into how participatory design can support more contextually grounded and critically engaged sustainability education.