Pixelated Life Fostering Environmental Enchantment through the Design of Children’s Media

Abstract

This article describes a seven-week project in which writing students design digitally mediated, play-based activities (card games, board games, pop-up books, or similar) to encourage children to experience a sense of environmental enchantment: an attentive, empathetic connection with the more-than-human world. The project emerged after students in several writing courses lamented modern life’s quickening pace and a corresponding loss of pleasurable nature experience. The project gives students space to practice—and to practice encouraging in others—slower, more attentive ecological relations while strengthening media production skills aimed at non-academic audiences. In doing so, students produce projects that, in the words of virologist Jonas Salk, practice being “good ancestors” to future generations.