Co-Designing Gamified Learning for Soft Skills: A Participatory Future Workshop

Rapidly evolving academic and professional environments require essential skills such as communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking, which are not typically learned and assessed explicitly in formal education. These skills encompass a significant part of the competencies and are increasingly valued in an AI-driven workforce because they cannot be easily replicated by machines. However, despite their growing relevance, students often lack awareness of the role and value of soft skills, and higher education institutions frequently address them only indirectly through content-focused, lecture-based instruction. This study responds to both the pedagogical gap and the challenges posed by the upskilling need within higher education by exploring how gamification can support the development of soft skills in academic settings. Using a participatory design approach, we conducted a Future Workshop with 52 master’s students in informatics at a university in southern Sweden. The workshop facilitated structured engagement in critique, ideation, and prototyping phases, during which seven student groups identified barriers to soft skills development and proposed gamified, digitally mediated solutions to enhance learning and engagement. A short questionnaire administered at the outset captured students’ baseline understanding of soft skills. The workshop produced several low-fidelity prototypes that illustrate how gamification can be integrated into curricula to develop soft skills through active, real-time application. The findings demonstrate how, in a participatory setting, students co-design meaningful learning environments and inform new directions for teaching practice. Furthermore, this study exemplifies the potential of the Future Workshop methodology to support students in developing interpersonal competencies and soft skills as part of their formal education, while also enhancing their ability to demonstrate knowledge and hard skills in a more GAI-resilient examination format