Home language literacy education in Australia has been pursued predominantly through Community Language Schools. At present, some 1,000 of these, attended by over 100,000 school-age children, cater for 69 of the over 300 languages spoken in Australia. Despite good intentions, these schools face a number of challenges. For instance, children may lack motivation and perceive after-hours schooling as an unnecessary burden. Trained teachers and suitable teaching materials are often not available. Moreover, not every language can be offered in each city or region. Hence, home language speakers' needs are often not met. This situation has detrimental effects for children, families and communities, and entails a loss of opportunities for the country. Reporting on an alternative approach, this paper presents a pilot study conducted in Australia with English-German bilinguals. We sought to investigate whether primary school-aged children can self-direct their home language literacy acquisition through playing online educational games, in the privacy of their homes and with little adult input. Results indicate that the games can be effective in promoting emergent literacy development. Thus, such a grassroots approach could become a viable option for multilingual societies, addressing some of the practical challenges faced by, for instance, Community Language Schools.

We report and reflect upon the early stages of a research project that endeavours to establish a culture of critical design thinking in a tertiary game design course. We first discuss the current state of the Australian game industry and consider some perceived issues in game design courses and graduate outcomes. The second section presents our response to these issues: a project in progress which uses techniques originally exploited by Augusto Boal in his work, Theatre of the Oppressed. We appropriate Boal's method to promote critical design thinking in a games design class. Finally, we reflect on the project and the ontology of design thinking from the perspective of Bruce Archer's call to reframe design as a 'third academic art'.

No abstract