M.09. Navigating Complexity: Game Design, Emotions, and AI for Democratic Citizenship Education

In a world marked by complexity, instability, and transitoriness, educating for active citizenship requires not only developing the ability to critically analyze technoscientific systems but also providing emotional tools to navigate uncertainty. Emotions are not ancillary to learning, they are its neuropsychological foundation: positive emotional states activate deep learning processes, while anxiety and stress, common when confronting unpredictable complex systems, generate blockage, withdrawal, and cognitive distress.

This panel explores how game design, COTS board games, and AI can serve as integrated educational ecosystems that combine complex systems modeling, cognitive and emotional empowerment, critical technoscientific understanding, psychological well-being, and democratic agency. COTS board games function as accessible complex systems incorporating risk, uncertainty, feedback loops, resource conflicts, and ethical dilemmas. Through play, students safely encounter emotionally resonant situations, tension, collaboration, rapid decision-making, failure, and redesign, activating components of emotional intelligence and fostering learning environments where mistakes spark curiosity rather than fear, and complexity cultivates resilience, awareness, and hope instead of toxic stress.

Generative AI can act as an emotional cognitive mediator: a dialogic space helping teachers and students reflect on strategies, thoughts, emotional states, and scenarios, reducing performance anxiety while promoting metacognition and self-efficacy. Rather than functioning as a technocratic authority, AI becomes a facilitator of well-being in thinking, supporting decision-making, narrative construction, emotional regulation, and reflective practice.

The panel invites contributions on how the convergence of technoscience, play, AI, and emotional intelligence can challenge technocratic reductionism and expand learners’ capacity to inhabit contemporary complex systems with greater health, clarity, and responsibility.