As we continue our celebration of digital arts this month, Luke Fraser, Mentor and Arts Award Consultant at MindJam explains how gaming can be used in Arts Award projects and how this has enabled them to recognise and celebrate the achievements of their mentees (young people).
When considering art forms for young people to engage with, gaming might not be the first form of media that comes to mind. Gaming is increasingly a part of our young people’s lives, not to mention being a significantly large industry itself employing professionals across a vast range of creative fields.
At MindJam we support young people with various differing needs through online mentoring sessions. We run a service that provides emotional, mental health, and Special Educational Needs (SEN) support and guidance through the use of gaming, and/or game related creative skills. We work closely with parents, local authorities, schools, and health specialists to ensure each young person receives the right support. MindJam is an approved provision for many local authorities and is available for all types of referrals.
Why Arts Awards?
When exploring options for qualifications to offer to our mentees we found that the Arts Award qualifications are a good fit due to the flexibility of how they can be implemented and delivered. Many of the young people that we support have had negative experiences of formal education, experience of school-based trauma and some are in recovery from autistic burnout. We have found that Arts Award is an effective means to offer a gentle reintroduction to some form of education in a low demand way, on the young person’s terms.
How we deliver Arts Award
We have been offering Arts Award to our mentees via our regular one-to-one sessions for just over two years. This has very much been on a case-by-case basis tailored to the young person’s interests and needs. We have been delivering Discover through to Gold in this format. More recently we have started to offer Discover to large groups attending our live events which is detailed in the Minecraft section further down.
Arts Award success
Many of the young people that we support are vulnerable and it could be the case that they do not currently access other forms of provision or education. We have found that Arts Award can be a really effective way of recognising and celebrating the achievements of the young people that we support. It has been a way of highlighting their skills and creative expression, helping them to see this themselves and develop their confidence and self-esteem. The Arts Award Discover and Explore levels in particular have been useful in these instances.
The Awards have also been really useful for some of our mentees with PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance). Due to their profile of needs, any learning must be approached in a low-demand, collaborative way. The Arts Award qualifications have been great for this as they have allowed for a very young person-led approach to be used.
Gaming in 2025
For those who haven't picked up a controller for some years and those not familiar with gaming, allow me to get you up to speed… There now exists a vast array of games spanning various genres from small indie titles up to well-known big game studios. Many games these days also offer some form of creative or sandbox mode (isolated testing environment) allowing players to experiment and to build and create whatever they would like to. Although there are now more games available than ever, the ‘big three’ that we mostly get requested at MindJam are:
Minecraft
- A block-based world where you can build anything, explore caves and survive by gathering resources.
Roblox
- A large games platform where people can play any of the millions of different games made by other users.
Fortnite
- Primarily a fast-paced fight to the last game (battle royal) that also has a comprehensive creative mode and now Lego game modes too.
How could gaming be used in an Arts Award context?
There are numerous ways that a young person can use games as a tool for creative expression. Here are just a few examples of the ways in which some of our mentees have used gaming as part of their Arts Award:
This list is not exhaustive but hopefully you can start to see some of the potential for gaming as a tool for creative expression.
Case study: Arts Award Minecraft build event
This has been the first year that we have started to offer Arts Award to large groups, expanding from our regular format of delivering on a one-to-one basis. We decided to focus on Arts Award Discover with the aim of further embedding Arts Award in the services that we offer. We wanted to raise awareness of the qualifications within our 3000+ cohort of young people in the hope that more will go on to access higher Arts Award levels in the future.
To prepare for the event a custom Minecraft world was created, hosted on a private server. This was only accessible to young people receiving MindJam provision and the server went live on the day of the event.
Mentees were encouraged to find out about other established Minecraft creators (Part B: Find out) and shown how to use tools and commands to support them with their own creations. The young people were then able to claim a plot of land and work on their own Minecraft builds to be used for Part A: Discover.
A live stream was set up during the event as an unlisted stream on YouTube with the link shared to mentees and parents to watch at home alongside joining in the game. Dan, the founder of MindJam, then joined the server to celebrate mentees' Minecraft builds and showcase these on the live stream. Mentees also had the opportunity to share their creations with each other during the event as they visited other plots and interacted in the text chat of the game.
A Google form was set up before the event to gather the mentee’s evidence for their Discover arts logs. This Google form then input the mentees responses and uploaded images directly into their own arts logs. This included their responses for Part C: Share. Some chose to share their creations with other mentees on the Minecraft server and others chose to share what they had found out along with their creations with their MindJam mentors in their regular one-to-one sessions. When describing what they enjoyed, many Discover achievers stated they enjoyed taking part in their builds alongside others. There were also quite a lot of responses that mentioned enjoying seeing their creations on YouTube through the live stream.
The impact of the event has been very positive. We have seen an increase in enquiries about higher levels of Arts Award, which has embedded the qualifications further into our regular one-to-one sessions. Following the success of our first group of 50 mentees completing Discover, we plan to follow this up soon with another live event for further mentees to join along with an opportunity to showcase their work for the award.
Header image: Screenshot by MindJam