In this episode, educator, game designer, and co-founder of Pill Bug Interactive, Sean Walton discusses the challenges of organising educational game jams, navigating participant dropoffs, offering participation incentives, and using game mechanics to convey the nuances of complex topics.

Sean is a Senior Lecturer in the Computational Foundry at Swansea University, where he runs the introduction to games programming module. He is interested in how we can use games and game design as educational tools. As part of this work, he was nominated in the 8th International Educational Games Competition for the “Love A Maggot” educational game. In 2018 with a team of academics he organised Climate Jam, a game jam where designers were tasked with creating games to communicate the complexities of climate science. Outside of academia he is the founding director of the independent games studio Pill Bug Interactive, who have shipped three titles, one of which was nominated for best video game created in Wales in the 2019 BAFTA Cymru awards.