Digital Games to Improve Learning in Haiti

Imagine producing curricula to teach a new language to an audience in a different country that has never had access to computers or the Internet. How will instructional designers and teachers communicate when worlds are so vastly different? Before reading, writing, or speaking, images and movement facilitate communication. This article describes a service-learning design case led by faculty at a southeastern university in the United States. It involved iterative instructional design (ID), development, and a formative evaluation process by which university students created digital games for twenty-three children in Haiti with minimal to no schooling. Lessons learned include how visual literacy (VL) is as crucial for the designers of instruction as it is for the recipients.