I was part of ETEC 565S this summer which was the Summer Institute on Digital Gaming. In the course, I was introduced to the Seven Sacred Teachings through a game designed by my classmates called Dani the Dinosaur. It was created on a program called Twinery and it teaches primary grade students (Kindergarten/Grade 1 students especially) about the Sacred Teachings that are deeply rooted in Indigenous culture. The game can captivate the attention of the younger audience and motivate them to learn more about the 7 Teachings. It has an engaging story with excellent voice narration and eye catching animations. As our projects only needed to be a minimum viable product, only the first level out of the three seen works. Even though there is only one working level, it shows the potential that digital games can have to teach Indigenous teachings to students.
This blog doesn’t let me put the HTML directly on here so I had to make it into a Zip file. If you would like to try and play the game, right click on the file below and choose Save Link As to download the .zip file, extract it, and then double click to play.
Additional information about the Seven Sacred Teachings can be find here: https://empoweringthespirit.ca/cultures-of-belonging/seven-grandfathers-teachings/
References:
Cameron, S., Carr, S. & Fung, J. (2021). Dani the Dino. [Video Game]. Twine.
Hey Juliano,
What a fantastic game!! The programmers/developers did such an amazing job!! The storyteller’s voice sounds so familiar to me. Hmmm I wonder who it could be??
Omg I didn’t realize you were in this class too! I was so excited to share the game with this class! The voice narration was my favorite part!