A STEM Education Tabletop Roleplaying Game for Informal Learning

Adventures with Emmy (AwE) is a new STEM education tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) that engages players in scientific practices and scientific argumentation, devleoping STEM identity and reinforcing awareness of STEM concepts. TTRPGs can be employed in an educational setting to promote academic literacies, 21st-century skills, attention restoration, socio-emotional learning, mindset learning, and projective identity trajectories. Following modern TTRPG design principles, AwE uses a modular character creation process to allow players to create a unique game identity from a personal background, a STEM field and specialization, and a choice of gameplay actions that embody field-authentic science and engineering practices. Interdisciplinary concentrations (such as biophysics) or unique career pursuits (such as public science communication) are expressable through AwE's archetype system. Game encounters and adventures are structured around disciplinary core ideas and cross-cutting concepts. In this presentation, we discuss the design principles that have informed AwE, preview game content, and review our public playtest of the game materials and invite attendees to participate.