Abstract:

In contemporary food environments, learners – particularly adolescents, encounter complex and often conflicting streams of nutritional information that extend well beyond formal education. Food-related knowledge is increasingly shaped by distributed media ecosystems, including advertising, influencer content, branding strategies, and public health messaging. This paper introduces an innovative pedagogical tool – a role-based storytelling card game – designed to support participants in critically engaging with these systems and developing systemic awareness of how food choices are constructed and influenced. The design of the game is theoretically grounded in Paulo Freire’s concept of dialogical pedagogy, which positions learning as a co-constructed, participatory process rooted in dialogue, critical reflection, and the negotiation of meaning. Rather than treating learners as passive recipients of knowledge, the game follows a problem-posing approach in which participants actively interrogate the communicative forces shaping food environments. This Freirean perspective is complemented by principles of experiential learning and systems thinking. Methodologically, the study adopts an exploratory design-based research approach, combining iterative prototyping with narrative outcomes. The game involves five players, each assigned a distinct institutional role expressed in role cards encoding specific perspectives and constraint: consumer advocate, food industry scientist, influencer/content creator, marketing professional, and public health regulator. Gameplay is structured around scenario cards presenting binary decision pathways related to food communication contexts. In each round, players, as actors, individually select and justify decisions aligned with their roles, and then collectively negotiate a shared “storyline backbone.” From this backbone, AI-supported narrative tools enable the generation of diverse story variations introducing an additional layer of complexity and reflexivity. Short stories can be created from the point of view of each actor, allowing participants to examine how small changes in decisions can lead to significantly different outcomes. This dynamics functions as an adaptive storytelling system: a learning environment in which each decision alters the narrative pathway, generating branching outcomes that reflect the complexity of real-world systems. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, it advances the conceptualization of gamification as a tool for epistemic engagement, emphasizing its capacity to support critical, systemic, and participatory forms of learning. Second, it demonstrates how Freirean principles can be operationalized within technologically enhanced environments, particularly through the integration of AI-driven narrative systems. By combining role-play, systems thinking, and AI-supported storytelling, the proposed framework redefines learning as an open, participatory, and evolving process. In doing so, it enriches ongoing discussions in education and new learning technologies, highlighting the potential of adaptive, storytelling-based approaches to address complex societal issues.

Keywords:

Food advertising, role-based storytelling card game, AI-narrative generation, adaptive learning, systemic awareness.