Mind the Gap - ROBLOX Game Co-Design at school
At the heart of the “Mind the Gap” project is a deliberate methodological choice: involving students not just as final recipients, but as active participants in the development of the video game.
The project as a whole takes a peer education approach. In the first phase, high school students studied the topic of addiction, then designed and built the awareness-raising program that, from September 2026, is being brought into middle school classrooms as a Roblox experience.
Co-designing with the people who will in turn pass the message on makes it possible to pinpoint the issues young people actually perceive, to focus on the most relevant aspects, and to deliver a language that belongs to those who will receive it.
The co-design project is led by the Unione di Comuni Terre d’Acqua, a union of six municipalities in the Bologna area, from Anzola dell’Emilia to Sant’Agata Bolognese. They chose Roblox as the environment to tackle a sensitive subject like addiction in its many forms: smoking, gambling, compulsive shopping, emotional dependency.
Alongside us, Strade APS, an organization that has long worked on the ground against educational poverty, provided the pedagogical expertise needed to address such sensitive topics with a teenage audience.
What sets Mind the Gap apart from a traditional development project is a starting point that flips the logic of the educational product: the game didn’t arrive in the classroom finished. It was born in the classroom, together with the students, through a participatory game design process. Fifty students from the area stepped into the roles of a real development team (artists, project managers, developers, copywriters), guided step by step by Melazeta on the technical side and by Strade on the content side. They discussed addiction before they even opened the Roblox editor, building the world and the narrative and learning to ask uncomfortable questions while learning game design.
The resulting game keeps working even after the workshop has ended: it is now available to teachers, educators and psychologists as a tool for addressing the topic of addiction in the classroom.
Client: Unione di Comuni Terre d’Acqua, with Strade APS as educational partner
Type: Educational co-design program on Roblox, carried out with secondary school students
Goal: To turn addiction prevention into an active experience, making the game creation process itself the first educational tool, and leaving schools a reusable game for classroom work
Target: Secondary school students
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